allenge involved in quickly trans$-$

porting the needed troops and cargo to the war zone was a

daunting one. A typical airlift mission carrying troops and

cargo from the United States to the Persian Gulf required

a three$-$day round$-$trip, visited seven or more different air$-$

fields, burned almost one million pounds of fuel, and cost

$$280,000.$ During Operation Desert Storm, the Military

Airlift Command $($MAC$)$ averaged more than $100$ such

missions daily as it managed the largest airlift in history.

To meet this challenge, operations research was

applied to develop the decision support systems needed

to schedule and route each airlift mission. The OR tech$-$

nique used to drive this process was dynamic program$-$

ming. The stages in the dynamic programming formulation

correspond to the airfields in the network of flight legs

several measures of performance: the lateness of deliver$-$

ies, the flying time of the mission, the ground time, and

the number of crew changes. The constraints include a

lower bound on the load carried by the mission and upper

bounds on the availability of crew and ground$-$support

resources at airfields.

This application of dynamic programming had a

dramatic impact on the ability to deliver the necessary

cargo and personnel to the Persian gulf quickly to sup$-$

port Operation Desert Storm. For example, when

speaking to the developers of this approach, MAC$$s

deputy chief of staff for operations and transportation is

quoted as saying, $$I guarantee you that we could not

have done that $($the deployment to the Persian Gulf$)$

without your help and the contributions you made to

$($the decision support systems$)$we absolutely could

not have done that.$$

Source: M$.$ C$.$ Hilliard, R$.$ S$.$ Solanki, C$.$ Liu, I. K$.$ Busch,

G$.$ Harrison, and R$.$ D$.$ Kraemer: $$Scheduling the Operation Desert

Storm Airlift: An Advan