Abstract
Governments have vital missions, such as securing their nation from many internal or external risks/threats. Thus, they prepare themselves against different scenarios. The most common scenario for all countries is “facing attacks from other countries”. However, training for these scenarios is not possible because military exercises are too expensive. The contribution of this paper is a scientific approach proposed for such a scenario. A mathematical model is developed to allocate different weapon types to a set of candidate locations (demand nodes, the military installations that need weapons) while minimizing total transportation costs, setup costs, and allocation risk. The risk arises from allocating the weapons to other military units as backups during a conflict. The risk increases when one military unit allocates their weapons to another unit during attacks. The mathematical model is tested on a case study problem of Turkish Land Forces. This case study is solved in 14 min, and the optimal total transportation and setup costs are determined. Since it is very important to make quick decisions during an attack, this scientific approach and computational time can be useful for military decision makers. Additionally, the results of this study can guarantee that any attack can be handled with the minimum cost and risk.
Highlights
The political instability in the Middle East region signals a potential change in the global political ecosystem as we know it today
Logistics 2018, 2, 9 and setup costs, as well as the risks associated with weapon locations; (ii) applying a location-allocation problem to a military case study; and (iii) taking weapon allocation risks into account
The case study was solved in approx. 14 min and the optimal total transportation and setup cost was 755,210,884.00
Summary
The political instability in the Middle East region signals a potential change in the global political ecosystem as we know it today. In this situation, countries need to pay special attention to their homeland defense. Homeland defense is defined by the US Department of Defense as “the protection of a country’s sovereignty, territory, domestic population, and critical defense infrastructure against external threats and aggression, or other threats” [1]. The political instability and the potential changes to the world political ecosystem make it essential that countries reevaluate their homeland defense mechanisms and maximize the efficiency of those mechanisms for responding to potential threats. This work is intended to demonstrate how research on location-allocation problems can be utilized for solving homeland defense problems
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