UNDERSEA LOGISTICS: ROUTING OPTIMIZATION IN GRAY ZONE ENVIRONMENTS

Unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) are being built to meet the growing demand for undersea operational awareness and payload delivery, but there are no tools for operational planners to handle logistics regarding UUVs, such as routing logistic vessels to UUVs of differing capabilities, unique requirements, and time constraints. The feasibility of UUV employment in this manner would result in lower risk and broaden the scope of mission sets for our limited arsenal of manned submarines. Current models seek to optimize a single logistic vessel’s pathing to a group of surface vessels. However, there are no models that seek to provide a global solution with multiple logistic vessels to multi-echelon UUVs. We generalize a prior model for medical evacuation with multiple types of unmanned vehicles using time-synchronized systems via a multiple-path orienteering problem. We extend that model to an undersea logistics problem in a contested environment, with heuristics to approximate global solutions. A successful model provides feasible solutions to a simple scenario for proof of concept and possible real-life scenarios.

Department dc:contributor.department

Operations Research (OR)

Grantor dc:publisher

Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Chu, Thuan D.

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Gallup, Shelley P.
• Yoshida, Ruriko

Statement dc:rights

• This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.

Dc Identifier Other

NPS-22-N355-A

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:calhoun.nps.edu:10945/72335