Estimating Loads of Aircraft in Planning for the Military Airlift Command

Abstract

The Military Airlift Command of the United States Air Force is responsible for evaluating the ability of the air force to move cargo and passengers during contingency situations (“deliberate planning”). This requires that aircraft be assigned to loads and scheduled. While most analyses have addressed aircraft assignment as a plane minimization problem because of constraints on the available airlift capacity, we addressed the problem as an aircraft load maximization problem. Our algorithm seeks to utilize each aircraft more fully. We compare this approach with a previous procedure.