The US Army Uses a Network Optimization Model to Designate Career Fields for Officers

Abstract

In 1999, the United States Army instituted a new career-progression pattern for its officers. This pattern assigns, or designates, Army officers to specialized roles in which they must serve. Such roles include, for example, foreign area officer and operations research analyst. Manually designating officers into these roles under the new system is impossible because the problem is very large. We developed a network-optimization model, the career-field designation model, that makes these designations in minutes on a personal computer. The US Army has used this system four times since June 2001 to designate a total of approximately 10,500 officers and expects to continue to use the model to designate about 1,500 officers each year.

Setting sail in a new direction

“…Admirals experience a very high level of authority, being in charge of significant operations, budgets and numbers of people. While the financial rewards are lower than in business, progress is clear, competitive and programmed (Sharman, 1996; Fagenson‐Eland and Kidder, 2000; Van Scotter et al , 2000; Shrimpton and Newman, 2005).…”

“…Indeed, the American corporate model and the military model were companion approaches for career paths and patterns of interaction (Cascio, 2002). But while new developments in business, management and careers emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the military retained its hierarchy, with formal and orderly practices, including preparation for retirement (Shrimpton and Newman, 2005; Spiegel and Shultz, 2003).…”

Assigning multi-preferences applicants to multi chances based on preference and chance balanced model

“…The organization can be a company, and the chance can be projects [7]. The organization also can be a huge government department like troops, and the chance can be new career fields [8]. How to allocate human resources efficiently and fairly is an important and difficult puzzle.…”

“…However, this manual operation is not efficient and sometimes even cannot figure out a result. Numerous researchers have developed spreadsheet optimization models to solve the human resources assignment puzzle (see [3,6,7,8]). …”