Abstract
Future Force Design (FFD) is a strategic planning activity that decides the programming of defence capability options. This is a complex problem faced by the Australian Department of Defence (DoD) and requires the simultaneous selection and scheduling of projects. Specifically, this is a NP-hard problem known as the Project Portfolio Selection and Scheduling Problem (PPSSP). While the PPSSP is a complex problem itself, its complexity is further increased when coupled with the additional characteristics that arise in the context of defence-oriented planning, such as long planning periods and complex operational constraints. As a result, many previous studies examined only a small number of projects over a short planning period and are largely unsuitable for the scale required in the defence sector. To address this issue, two primary contributions are made in this paper. Firstly, this study describes a complex practical PPSSP, inspired by the FFD process, and develops a corresponding mathematical model. Problem instances are derived from real-world, publicly-available defence data. Secondly, to address instances of the problem, two existing meta-heuristics are considered and a hybrid, multi-population approach is proposed. Results are compared against those attained by a commercial exact solver and indicate that there is no statistically significant difference in performance between the proposed multi-population approach and the exact solver. A key benefit of the proposed meta-heuristic approach is that its run time is not significantly influenced by the complexity of the problem instance. Additionally, many interesting practical insights regarding the solution of selection and scheduling problems are uncovered.
Highlights
The Future Force Design (FFD) problem is a complex planning task undertaken by defence organizations that assists in making critical investment decisions for the future defence force
This paper investigates the use of meta-heuristic approaches to address a Project Portfolio Selection and Scheduling Problem (PPSSP) formulated in the context of FFD, thereby bridging the aforementioned discrepancy between the literature and the real-world problems faced by defence organizations
To evaluate the performance of a parameter configuration, the fitness was taken as the average portfolio value over 5 runs, each run for a total of 50,000 function evaluations, on a heavily constrained problem instance with 1000 available projects over a 20 year planing period
Summary
The Future Force Design (FFD) problem is a complex planning task undertaken by defence organizations that assists in making critical investment decisions for the future defence force This problem is often addressed using a CapabilityBased Planning (CBP) framework. A. APPLICATIONS OF THE PROJECT PORTFOLIO SELECTION AND SCHEDULING PROBLEM Ghasemzadeh et al [24] proposed a 0-1 model for integrated project selection and scheduling, including various operational constraints, that was addressed with a commercial exact solver. APPLICATIONS OF THE PROJECT PORTFOLIO SELECTION AND SCHEDULING PROBLEM Ghasemzadeh et al [24] proposed a 0-1 model for integrated project selection and scheduling, including various operational constraints, that was addressed with a commercial exact solver Their example application consisted of 20 projects and an eight-year planning period. The iterative approach of this study may lead to suboptimal solutions
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