Fleet Mix Planning in the U.S. Coast Guard: Issues and Challenges for DSS*

Abstract

Fleet mix planning in the U.S. Coast Guard involves determining a combination of naval assets best suited to meet the Coast Guard's future mission requirements while satisfying various resource constraints. In this paper, I describe the problem, and present and discuss certain challenges it raises in the field of decision support systems (DSS). The fleet mix planning problem is fairly unstructured, has a long-term planning horizon and impact, and there is uncertainty about future mission objectives and demand for the fleet's services. As such, I believe, it is a classical application suited to the use of DSS technology, according to accepted definitions of a DSS. However, an examination of DSS theory and technology reveals that current DSS theories and implementations do not adequately address this problem. Thus, the fleet mix planning problem raises several research challenges in the design and implementation of decision support systems. In this paper, I discuss the problem and these challenges in detail, and propose that fleet mix planning could be a useful benchmark problem for DSS ; Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA ; http://archive.org/details/fleetmixplanning00bhar ; O&MN, Direct Funding ; NA ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.