Topological and Computational Aspects of Preemptive Multicriteria Military Personnel Assignment Problems

This paper first presents a brief reveiw of the multicriteria problems faced by the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps in making enlisted personnel assignment decisions. Then for the most complex of these military assignment problems, the Marine Corps problem, a new modeling and solution approach is presented with computational results for a problem having eleven criteria and approximately 10,000 constraints and 780,000 variables. Other contributions of this paper include: (a) New insights into the effects on model structure and solution efficiency of handling preemptive multiple criteria sequentially versus simultaneously. (b) Derivation of an excellent convex proportional fill function. (c) Providing multicriteria researchers with a class of large-scale test problems.