Network Optimization for Army

informs
Vol. 35, No. 3, May–June 2005, pp. 230–237 issn 0092-2102 eissn 1526-551X 05 3503 0230

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doi 10.1287/inte.1050.0137 © 2005 INFORMS

The US Army Uses a Network Optimization Model to Designate Career Fields for Officers
Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel—G1, 300 Army Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301, [e-mail] Division of Economics and Business, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado 80401, [e-mail]

Dan Shrimpton

Alexandra M. Newman

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. Key words: military: personnel; networks/graphs: applications. History: This paper was refereed.

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he United States Army personnel system determines the way in which approximately 500,000 US soldiers in 100 countries are assigned to jobs, promoted, educated, trained, and separated from the Army. One of the system’s tasks is to match enough qualified soldiers to career tracks to meet staffing requirements. We developed a network-optimization model, the career-field designation (CFD) model, that aids the Army in assigning its 49,000 senior leaders (officers) to jobs. The Army assigns officers to many fields of specialization, for example, the infantry, which has a “ mission to close with the enemy by means of fire and movement to defeat or capture him,” and

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