Lineærprogrammering og mixed integer programmering i strukturanalyser - grunnlag og erfaringer

The basic concept of optimisation – to find the best solution to a decision-problem, given a set of decisions, an objective and a set of constraints – is at the very hart of decision support and operations research. It should therefore have a central place also in defence planning, which is a major area of application of operations analysis. This report provides a brief overview of basic principles and theory of optimisation in general and linear programming and mixed integer programming in particular. It then presents and provides practical experience from the application of LP and MIP on three different defence planning issues under the NATO DRR process. The three projects are DRR fulfilment, which is matching of generic capability requirements with specific units’ capabilities, an air-recce optimisation model and a model to pre-process aerospace-related generic requirements for fulfilment. High level COTS modelling and implementation software was used in the three projects, and it is claimed that a sufficiently skilled analyst effectively can implement her own models within a matter of hours or days as part of the main analysis without taking on major costs in software development. This report is prepared for project GOAL, and is a part of a series of survey reports covering different OR methods.