A Reactive Tabu Search Metaheuristic Extension of the Air Refueling Tanker Assignment Problem

The Combined Mating and Ranging Planning System (CMARPS) is the system used by AMC to schedule air refueling for deployments from the continental US to other parts of the world. The tool developed by Capehart (2000) provided results similar to CMARPS in less time. Capehart`s tool allows AMC to input several receiver groups consisting of various aircraft types and numbers. Each receiver group contains a point of origin and destination, with the option of providing one waypoint along the path, a ready to load date (RLD) and required delivery date (RDD). The user is also able to specify the locations of military tanker aircraft. The main goal of this tool is to assign the tankers to the different refueling points of the receiver groups so that all receiver groups arrive before their RDD.