Military Sealift Command (MSC) introduced its new Dry Cargo and Ammunition Ship (T-AKE) in June 2006, to replace its retiring ammunition and fast combat stores supply ships. MSC seeks new ways to use T-AKEs, fleet replenishment oilers, and fast combat support ships to better support the U.S. Navy. We evaluate two alternate ways to manage these ships, one where each ship operates under a particular "fleet ownership," and another where these ships are "globally allocated," serving any fleet customer as needed worldwide. We introduce an optimization-based scheduling tool, and use it to evaluate an expository 181-day peacetime scenario. We track daily inventories of 13 battle groups - carrier strike groups, expeditionary strike groups, surface strike groups, and a littoral combat ship squadron - to gain insight into how to best employ CLF ships. We determine that, in our scenario, global allocation provides significantly better service to fleet customers.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering; and, (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1977. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: leaves 114-116. / M.S.

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Bibliography: leaves 107-109.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007. / Committee Chair: Al-Khayyal, Faiz; Committee Member: Barnes, Earl; Committee Member: Johnson, Ellis; Committee Member: Karimi, IA; Committee Member: Sokol, Joel.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. / Professor Michael D. Meyer, Committee Member ; Professor Ozlem Ergun, Committee Chair ; Professor Ellis Johnson, Committee Member ; Professor George L. Nemhauser, Committee Member ; Professor H. Venkateswaran, Committee Member.

The world's shipping lanes are an area of intense focus in the Global War on Terror. Every day millions of tons of cargo are shipped through thousands of ports. Most cargo is harmless, however, some ships carry the weapons and human operators of terrorist organizations. To prevent the spread of weapons and terror suspects on the sea lanes, the cargo, passengers, and crew of these vessels must be subject to a level of scrutiny that is orders of magnitude greater than current efforts. The ability to rapidly extend a network and provide virtual expert services to Visit, Board, Search and Seizure (VBSS) boarding teams is crucial to protecting the United States and its allies from seaborne terror attacks and infiltration. This thesis uses scenario-based experimentation to examine the methods for implementing near-real-time collaborative work spaces in a virtual environment able to support VBSS operation anywhere in the world, limited only by network connectivity. The use of collaborative tools vastly increases the amount, type, and accuracy of information that can be processed. Radiation detection or classification and biometric fusion are among the hundreds of virtual collaborative sources that can be leveraged as force multipliers to bring network centric warfare to the maritime security domain.

The term "Maritime Interdiction Operations" usually refers to Visit, Board, Search and Seizure (VBSS) operations executed today all over the world. These operations are conducted as a part of the maritime law enforcement policy of each country inside their respective territorial waters or as a part of the homeland security requirements as they are mandated today by the global war against terrorism. Very often lately, they are conducted by allied maritime forces in international waters as well. Although such operations might seem quite simple in execution, the global war against terrorism has dramatically increased their level of complexity. In the past, searching cargo ships for illegal or contraband cargo was not that complicated or that important for national security, but now, searching for non-proliferation, radiological or bio-chemical material, as well as for possible terrorists among the crew members of a ship, is a very complex operation that cannot tolerate mistakes or omissions. This thesis examines the requirements posed by a boarding team, either from the navy or the law enforcement community, on information flow from and to them, in order to enhance their situational awareness and decision making capability during Maritime Interdiction Operations. That information flow is provided by several wireless network technologies, implemented during field trials, as part of the NPS CENETIX (Center for Network Innovation and Experimentation) lab s maritime subset of experimentation. During these field trials, a wireless extension of the internet is deployed to the sea, allowing the boarding team to access information and collaborate with remotely located experts and respective operational commands, the technical aspects, the benefits and shortcomings of the utilized technologies and collaborative tools are screened against the maritime war fighter's operational requirements.

In maritime transportation, liner shipping accounts for over 60\% of the value of goods shipped. However, very limited literature is available on the study of various problems in liner shipping. In this thesis we focus on problems related to this industry. Given a set of cargo to be transported, a set of ports and a set of ships, a common problem faced by carriers in liner shipping is the design of their service network. We develop an integrated model to design service network for the ships and to route the available cargo, simultaneously. The proposed model incorporates many relevant constraints, such as the weekly frequency constraint on the operated routes, and emerging trends, such as obtaining benefits from transshipping cargo on two or more service routes, that appear in practice but have not been considered previously in literature. Also, we design exact and heuristic algorithms to solve the integer program efficiently. The proposed algorithms integrate the ship scheduling problem, a tactical planning level decision, and the cargo routing problem, an operational planning level decision, and provide good overall solution strategy. Computational experiments indicate that larger problem instances, as compared to the literature, can be solved using these algorithms in acceptable computational time. Alliance formation is very common among global liner carriers however a quantitative study of liner alliances is missing from literature. We provide a mathematical framework for the quantitative study of these alliances. For the formation of a sustainable alliance, carriers need to agree on an overall service network and resolve issues concerning distribution of benefits and costs among the members of the alliance. We develop mechanisms to design a collaborative service network and to manage the interaction among the carriers through the allocation of profits in a fair way. The mechanism utilizes inverse optimization techniques to obtain resource exchange costs in the network. These costs provide side payments to the members, on top of the revenue generated by them in the collaborative solution, to motivate them to act in the best interest of the alliance while satisfying their own self interests.

This thesis introduces a new model formulation to solve routing and scheduling problems, with the main applications in answering routing and scheduling problems faced by a sea-cargo shipping company and a railroad company. For the work in sea-cargo routing and scheduling, we focus on the tramp shipping operation. Tramp shipping is a demand-driven type of shipping operation which does not have fixed schedules. The schedules are based on the pickup and download locations of profitable service requests. Given set of products distributed among a set of ports, with each product having pickup and download time windows and a destination port, the problem is to find the schedule for a fleet of ships that maximizes profit over a specified time horizon. The problem is modeled as a Mixed Integer Non-Linear Program and reformulated as an equivalent Mixed Integer Linear Program. Three heuristic methods, along with computational results, are presented. We also exploit the special structure enjoyed by our model and introduce an upper-bounding problem to the model. With a little modification, the model is readily extendable to reflect soft time windows and inter-ship cargo-transfers. The other part of our work deals with train routing and scheduling. A typical train shipment consists of a set of cars having a common origin and destination. To reduce the handling of individual shipments as they travel, shipments are grouped into blocks. The problem is that given sets of blocks to be carried from origins to destinations, construct the most cost effective train routes and schedules and determine block-to-train assignments, such that the number of block transfers (block swaps) between trains, the number of trains used, and some other cost measures are minimized. Incorporating additional precedence requirements, the modeling techniques from the shipping research are employed to formulate a mixed integer nonlinear program for this train routing and scheduling problem. Computational results are presented.

Thesis (Master of Military Studies)--USMC Command and Staff College, 2008. / Title from PDF title screen. Text document in PDF format. Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-22).