COMBINING MISSIONS TO IMPROVE RESOURCE UTILIZATION

Once the first set of missions has been allocated, you can use the mission windows commands under the Edit menu to inspect what has changed and to commit the results to the Corporate database. Missions that have been allocated outside their planned interval or missions that have been allocated to different wings will need to be reviewed by the planner.

After the first round of mission has been properly committed to the database, new missions can be loaded. In this example we loaded nine new missions and tried to initially allocate all of them using the top-level automatic allocation command.

Exploring Mission Merging
Given the high resource contention at this point, five of those nine missions could not be scheduled. We select the mission 698DA-TDC1RD-1 by clicking on its name.

By its name and by inspecting the itinerary of the selected mission, we noticed that this mission is coming back from Puerto Rico while several others are going to Puerto Rico. Maybe there is some opportunity for recycling or combining missions here. We open the preference window and select mission merging as one of the alternatives we want the system to compute. Then we ask the system to compare options.

For this particular mission, the system was able to find a possible combination that would reduce the overall cost of a round trip by 12%. We select this option and move to the COMBINED sheet to see the result of the merging.

In the COMBINED sheet are the two missions that have been combined. By selecting both of them and using the menu command Edit | Show Links we can see how these missions are related. You can also inspect these missions using the menu command Map | Show Missions.

Back to Compare Allocation Options for Unschedulable Missions

Forward to Automatically Combining Missions