Acquisition Research for Design and Service Enterprises

Abstract

In organizations responsible for the design, service, and management and distribution of products, acquisition decisions and product upgrades must be synchronized with service tasks and fleet operations. In partnership with the U.S. Navy's torpedo enterprise, this research investigates operations and acquisition concepts for such organizations using mathematical and simulation models. The tasks proposed in this project are as follows: 1) Modeling of functions representing deterioration patterns governing the efficiency of real systems and development of solution methods for optimization using these functions. This was to include the development of system efficiency metrics, factoring in the impact of obsolescence and appropriate risk mitigations strategies to be designed and evaluated. 2) Development of algorithms for solving obsolescence problems with realistic dimensions.3) Models for determining and evaluating acquisition decisions and product upgrades which must be synchronized with service tasks and fleet operations while maintaining an effective inventory were to be constructed.