Guided design search in the interval-bounded sailor assignment problem

The problem of assigning Navy personnel to jobs is primarily a manual process performed by enlisted detailers, with decision support from the Enlisted Assignment Information System. In this paper, we offer an expanded interval bounded network flow model of the sailor assignment process creating teams of skilled sailors to be assigned to ships. A new integer preprocessing and solution technique, Guided Design Search (GDS), is integrated into the CPLEX solver with promising results for these difficult problems. Computational results show GDS/CPLEX speed improvements of 10-fold to optimality and for larger problems found feasible assignments when CPLEX alone could not. We show how GDS results can be used by detailers to gauge the effectiveness of alternative sailor assignments and also how it can be used to validate the objective function coefficients of the decision variables.