Object oriented modeling of the strategic brigade airdrop operation (WIP)

The Strategic Brigade Airdrop operation is a large-scale strategic airlift operation in which the United States Air Force moves a brigade-sized force of United States Army troops and their equipment to a remote airfield located virtually anywhere in the world. To better study the decision-making process, an object-oriented simulation model has been created that captures the essential dynamics of the process. The decision-making rules used in this initial simulation are those heuristic rules developed by planners within the Air Mobility Command, the division inside the Air Force responsible for the operation. An important question is whether these rules are the best way to accomplish the mission or not, and if not, how can the decisions inside the operation be made more efficiently to improve the probability of mission success. To that end an additional component to the simulation is being added which will make the decisions based on experience gained over previous runs of the simulation through the use of a cost functional analysis that assigns costs and benefits to the results of various decisions. Over time the algorithm should converge to a solution that minimizes this cost functional and presumably make the best set of decisions for this stochastic dynamic problem.