Improving Marine Corps Total Life Cycle Management by Connecting Collected Data and Simulation

Marine Corps Total Life Cycle Management (TLCM) is critical in meeting requirements established in Department of Defense Directive 4151.18, notably, “optimizing … concepts to deliver efficient and effective performance to the operating forces.” Modeling and simulation (M&S) creates an opportunity to explore improvement opportunities before costly decisions are implemented. Unfortunately, applying M&S to TLCM efforts has been hampered in the past by an inefficient, error prone process of moving gathered data to an M&S platform. This research uses Visual Basic for Applications to link two Marine Corps TLCM tools: the Systems Operational Effectiveness Decision Support Tool (SOE DST) and the Total Life Cycle Management Assessment Tool (TLCM-AT). The Bridging Operational Logistics Tool (B-OLT) is created to allow TLCM-AT models to be built automatically, using existing SOE DST data and limited subject matter expert inputs. The B-OLT built models are assessed, exercised with state-of-the-art design of experiments and used to predict future events. The research shows a link between data currently collected and simulation allows for quantitative analysis. This analysis explores the Marine Corps’ data collection and summary techniques, and their application to modeling, demonstrating how B-OLT can be used to aid in future analytical efforts.