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.
