The U.S. Army National Guard's Mobile Training Simulators Location and Routing Problem

For training National Guard units the US Army National Guard will eld combat vehicle training simulators called Mobile Trainers Each National Guard unit must train at a station which is not farther than a speci ed maximum travel distance from its armory We address the problem of nding the optimum locations for the home bases for the mobile trainers the locations of secondary training sites to which the mobile trainers will travel to provide training and the actual routes that the mobile trainers will take to cover all these secondary training sites The aim is to allocate each National Guard unit to a training site within the maximum travel distance from its armory while simultaneously minimizing the mobile trainer eet mileage and the total distance traveled by all units The problem is too large and complex to solve as a single model We apply a heuristic decomposition strategy to break the overall problem into manageable stages developing suitable substitute objective functions for each This approach led to a solution in which the mobile trainer eet mileage is miles per year about smaller than the miles per year in the original Army s procurement plan Our solution has been implemented with minor modi cations