Come join ISE’s faculty and students as they welcome their own, Brandon McConnell, to discuss how his research reduces the complex issues that arise when the military moves supplies around the world.
As always refreshments will be served from 10:30 – 10:50 am in room 428 Daniels Hall.
The U.S. Army’s implementation of the Global Combat Support System-Army (GCSS-A) as an enterprise resource planning system has been a significant transformation in military logistics yet senior leaders have noted the Army has not yet fully exploited this unprecedented access to data to support operational planning and decision-making. High levels of uncertainty, multiple courses of action, and contingency plan to manage possible disruptions all challenge operationally relevant, computationally permissible models of expeditionary military logistics. Recent advances in queuing theory have opened new opportunities for analytic modeling of complex systems that permit modeling both time-varying (nonstationary) and non-Markovian (nonexponential) properties across complicated systems and networks. This presentation discusses the benefits and challenges associated with integrating some of these modern advancements with previous deterministic approaches to obtain near-real-time stochastic performance predictions while staying faithful to detailed problem nuances. This research presents a solution that required integrating recent advances in transient queue analysis with a deterministic logistics model. A notional contingency scenario provides the context to present these challenges.
Brandon McConnell is a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Logistics (CAMAL) at NC State University. Brandon leads the Military Operations Research Group consisting of faculty and active duty and veteran students working on military and national security challenges. He completed is PhD in Operations Research at NC State and previously served as a US Army Infantry officer. He suffers from a chronic surfing addiction.
