Convoy movement problem for combat supply distribution network on the battlefield

Abstract

The convoy movement problem involves the routing and scheduling of military convoys. While existing research has focused only on the routing and scheduling of convoys, this paper proposes a novel convoy movement problem that incorporates the location-allocation problem, thus making it significantly more comprehensive and useful for real-world scenarios. Our framing of the problem also has a significant impact on military logistics, enabling the more efficient transportation of military supplies during wartime. Our problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model, and we develop a matheuristic algorithm consisting of two phases that are executed iteratively to solve it. In the first phase, an optimisation solver is used to generate an origin and destination pair for a convoy and the quantity of each supply type to be transported. In the second phase, we employ an ant colony optimisation algorithm to determine the final solution based on the results of the first phase. Computational experiments show that the proposed matheuristic algorithm outperforms a commercial solver in terms of performance and computational time. Furthermore, we analyse the impact of changes to the headway time, time windows, and network density on the problem, thus producing valuable insights for military decision-makers.