Optimal assignment of military landed machines and equipment in reservoir dredging operations

Due to the steep terrain and unbalanced seasonal rainfall in Taiwan, it is not only difficult to reserve water but also easy to bring massive silt into reservoirs. In practice the assignment of machines and equipment in reservoir dredging operations is manually determined by staff with experience, without optimization from a systemic perspective, which is neither efficient in decision process nor effective in resourse usage, and could even result in inproper decisions. Therefore, in this research, referring to real practices we employ the integer programming technique to develop an optimization model, coupled with a heuristic algorithm, for the authority to efficiently and effectively solve for the assignment of machines and equipmentm in landed dredging operations. To evaluate the model and solution algorithm in practice, we performed a case study using the data collected from an army dredging operation. The preliminary results were good, showing that the model and solution algorithm could be useful reference for practice.