Inventory routing for defense: Moving supplies in adversarial and partially observable environments. (January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Blom, Michelle; Shekh, Slava; Gossink, Don; Miller, Tim; Pearce, Adrian R
• Other Names: Damodaran Suresh guest-editor.; Wagner Neal guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Journal of defense modeling and simulation. Volume 17:Number 1(2020:Jan.)
• Page Start: 55
• Page End: 81
• Publication Date: 2020-01
• Subjects: Defense logistics -- autonomous vehicles -- dynamic inventory routing -- partial observability -- agent-based simulation; Military art and science -- Computer simulation -- Periodicals; 355.0011305
• DOI: 10.1177/1548512918798056
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1548-5129

Abstract

Future defense logistics will be heavily reliant on autonomous vehicles for the transportation of supplies. We consider a dynamic logistics problem in which: multiple supply item types are transported between suppliers and consuming (sink) locations; and autonomous vehicles (road-, sea-, and air-based) make decisions on where to collect and deliver supplies in a decentralized manner. Sink nodes consume dynamically varying demands (whose timing and size are not known a priori). Network arcs, and vehicles, experience failures at times, and for durations, that are not known a priori. These dynamic events are caused by an adversary, seeking to disrupt the network. We design domain-dependent planning algorithms for these vehicles whose primary objective is to minimize the likelihood of stockout events (where insufficient resource is present at a sink to meet demand). Cost minimization is a secondary objective. The performance of these algorithms, across varying scenarios, with and without restrictions on communication between vehicles and network locations, is evaluated using agent-based simulation. We show that stockpiling-based strategies, where quantities of resource are amassed at strategic locations, are most effective on large land-based networks with multiple supply item types, with simpler "shuttling"-based approaches being sufficient otherwise.