Application of Operations Research in Defence and Military Supply Chain & Field Logistics: A Review

Defence logistics must send supplies to moving units on time. Transport is limited. The budget is fixed. An enemy can destroy vehicles and depots. This paper reviews sixteen studies on how Operations Research can help with this problem. Each study looks at one stage of the defence supply chain. These stages go from budget allocation and base location to weapon‑target assignment, tactical distribution, battlefield inventory and deployment scheduling. The studies were grouped into four technique families: assignment and Integer Programming, location‑allocation, network routing and distribution and scheduling and Simulation. Each study was compared on the problem it addressed the technique used the decision variables, objectives and constraints the results and the limitations. Three patterns emerged. Military objectives are different from ones. They give weight to exposure to attack, lateness and destroyed target value than just cost. Realistic models become too large, for methods. Therefore heuristics, decomposition and learning‑based methods are common. Many models assume fixed, conditions and are tested on hypothetical scenarios. The main gap is the lack of models that link these decisions under battlefield uncertainty and adversarial behaviour.

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