Evaluation of tendered solutions for scheduling problems with specific reference to a helicopter aviation training system

Received 08 November 2016 Accepted 02 December 2017 Abstract—This paper describes a discrete event simulation (DES) methodology for the evaluation and comparison of tenders for highly constrained scheduling problems. What-if scenarios have been implemented via branch and bound search through the DES parameter space to derive best performance configurations for each tendered solution with respect to an appropriate metric. This provides more objective and cross-tender comparable performance assessment based not only on what is reported via each tender’s dispatch results, but also on best performance of the tendered solutions over all possible determinants of the schedule’s efficiency. It also provides insight into the limitations of each tender such as bottlenecks and predicted resource availability. Such analyses are presented is a useful dashboard visualization that makes details of the tender comparisons easy to access. We illustrate this approach with the problem of evaluating and comparing a number of tendered aviation training schedules and their resource allocation plans against predetermined training objectives.