A Risk-Based Location-Allocation Approach for Weapon Logistics

Cihan Çetinkaya, Samer Haffar
2018 Logistics  
Governments have vital missions, such as securing their nation from many internal or external risks/threats. Thus, they prepare themselves against different scenarios. The most common scenario for all countries is "facing attacks from other countries". However, training for these scenarios is not possible because military exercises are too expensive. The contribution of this paper is a scientific approach proposed for such a scenario. A mathematical model is developed to allocate different
more » ... n types to a set of candidate locations (demand nodes, the military installations that need weapons) while minimizing total transportation costs, setup costs, and allocation risk. The risk arises from allocating the weapons to other military units as backups during a conflict. The risk increases when one military unit allocates their weapons to another unit during attacks. The mathematical model is tested on a case study problem of Turkish Land Forces. This case study is solved in 14 min, and the optimal total transportation and setup costs are determined. Since it is very important to make quick decisions during an attack, this scientific approach and computational time can be useful for military decision makers. Additionally, the results of this study can guarantee that any attack can be handled with the minimum cost and risk. Logistics 2018, 2, 9 2 of 15 and setup costs, as well as the risks associated with weapon locations; (ii) applying a location-allocation problem to a military case study; and (iii) taking weapon allocation risks into account. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 is a review of location problems and their various applications, as well as a review of weapon assignment problems. Section 3 introduces the mathematical notation and the mathematical model for this problem. Section 4 describes the case study (and its data sources and assumptions) that we used to test the model. Section 5 describes how the problem is solved using Excel and OpenSolver, and summarizes the solution results. Section 6 presents the results of solving the model we introduced. This section also addresses this work's limitations and potential improvements. Section 7 is this work's conclusion. Literature Review This work is an application of location-allocation problems to a military problem. Therefore, this review surveys the literature on both facility location problems and military optimization problems relevant to this work. Facility Location Problems
doi:10.3390/logistics2020009 fatcat:2qclk44jmffjnpqm7q2riikwui