On 17th April 2012 the West Midlands Branch of the IMA will hear ‘Routing Military Convoys’ by Andy Verity-Harrison. in Birmingham near New Street railway station. Non-members welcome, no charge is made. Abstract:
Current military operations emphasise the need for mobility more than ever. Thus, routing convoys so that they reach their correct destinations in the shortest time is important. However, the planning itself can be considerable and must be carried out quickly if operational tempo is to be maintained. With this in mind the military planning problem of simultaneously routing multiple convoys between multiple origin and destination locations was formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem and used as a benchmark problem for investigating the applicability of a variety of optimisation methods to military decision making.