The US Army Uses a Network Optimization Model to Designate Career Fields for Officers

Dan Shrimpton () and Alexandra M. Newman ()
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Dan Shrimpton: Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel—G1, 300 Army Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301
Alexandra M. Newman: Division of Economics and Business, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado 80401

Interfaces, 2005, vol. 35, issue 3, 230-237

Abstract: In 1999, the United States Army instituted a new career-progression pattern for its officers. This pattern assigns, or designates, Army officers to specialized roles in which they must serve. Such roles include, for example, foreign area officer and operations research analyst. Manually designating officers into these roles under the new system is impossible because the problem is very large. We developed a network-optimization model, the career-field designation model, that makes these designations in minutes on a personal computer. The US Army has used this system four times since June 2001 to designate a total of approximately 10,500 officers and expects to continue to use the model to designate about 1,500 officers each year.

Keywords: military: personnel; networks/graphs: applications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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