A Desktop-OR Success: Modeling Coast Guard Buoy Tender Operations

Mark Bucciarelli and Kip Brown
Additional contact information
Mark Bucciarelli: Queues Enforth Development, Inc., 432 Columbia Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02141
Kip Brown: Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142-1093

Interfaces, 1995, vol. 25, issue 4, 1-11

Abstract: We created a desktop-OR decision support system to support the Coast Guard’s planned replacement of the 37-vessel seagoing and coastal buoy tender fleet. Using sophisticated GIS routines to build travel networks and a rudimentary traveling salesman problem heuristic to generate routes, we proposed a seven-vessel decrease in the fleet, representing a capital cost savings of $350 million and personnel reduction of 500 billets. The commandant presented these results to Congress, and the Senate’s fiscal year 1993 US Department of Transportation’s appropriations bill fully funded the replacement request and commended the Coast Guard’s analytical effort. The success of this application suggests a dynamic for the burgeoning desktop-OR market; the interface between operations research models and their algorithms is far more developed than the interface between actual problems and their models, and success will come to those who facilitate this latter mapping.

Keywords: government: services; coast guard; decision analysis: applications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.25.4.1 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orinte:v:25:y:1995:i:4:p:1-11

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Interfaces from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().