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The purpose of this paper is to improve the air movement operations planning heuristic in the literature to generate better solutions in a shorter time period.

Through a rigorous design of experiments (DOEs), we make significant heuristic improvements by evaluating alternative modular methodologies and tuning heuristic parameters for two scenarios. This includes a new approach to considering refueling operations.

We find the fine-tuned heuristic averages a 33% objective improvement and 70% reduction in computation time over the heuristic with original parameters for one of the scenarios. Additionally, we analyze the heuristic's quality of solution over time.

Further analysis is required to generalize heuristic settings, which would require significant access to operational data or a portfolio of scenarios of interest.

Tuned heuristic parameters reduce the computation time from hours to minutes. This also makes it practically feasible to adjust parameters in the objective function to generate multiple courses of action (COAs) for a given instance.

This research provides novel vehicle assignment and routing heuristic improvement alternatives and demonstrates a DOEs-based heuristic tuning procedure.

This paper aims to measure the effect of supply discrepancy reports (SDRs) on military aircraft readiness metrics, including aircraft availability, not mission capable supply (NMCS) hours, cannibalizations and mission-impaired capability awaiting parts (MICAP) hours.

Monthly SDR, NMCS, aircraft cannibalizations and MICAP data from 2009 to 2018 are analyzed using linear regression and independent samples t-tests to examine whether discrepant shipments negatively impact aircraft readiness.

Results of linear regression were significant in 4 of 12 analyses, suggesting that SDRs are a significant predictor of increased cannibalizations. Results of independent samples t-tests found MICAP hours were significantly higher on discrepant shipments compared to nondiscrepant shipments in all three analyses.

This research will increase awareness of the extent to which SDRs degrade aircraft readiness, and provide an opportunity for United States Department of Defense (DoD) supply chain leaders to take action to improve order fulfillment performance in their organizations.

Little research has been done investigating the impact of SDRs within the DoD, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous study has examined the effect of SDRs on military aircraft readiness metrics.