Simulation based multi-mission cutter scheduling evaluation for the United States Coast Guard

The United States Coast Guard (USCG) plans the world-wide operations of its ships, referred to as cutters. Rule-based decision making mechanisms, the primary planning tools, are aimed at ensuring adequate time inport for maintenance, stand-by, and generalized assignments for at-sea deployments to geographic regions. This approach is problematic. Stochastic events are becoming increasingly costly. In 2013, Coast Guard cutters suffered nearly four times the normally allocated amount of operational days lost to unplanned repairs. Additionally, the predominant metric used by schedulers is the amount of time a cutter is focused on a single, primary mission. The reality of multi-mission operations is that unplanned emergency missions often supersede planned, routine missions. Furthermore, mission results contribute to multiple strategic goals, though to varying extents based on geographic area. We propose a comprehensive multi-mission schedule evaluation mechanism that measures productivity, given limited Coast Guard resources, across a spectrum of current and future scenarios.