Author Description

Capital Investment Planning Aid (CIPA) is an optimization-based decision support system custom-built for the U.S. Navy to formulate complete force structure plans that include ship, submarine, and aircraft procurement and retirement schedules over a 30-year planning horizon. This is an important problem, representing a $1 trillion (2002 dollars) commitment by the Navy. Each candidate plan must respect annual budgets in several funding categories, while following Navy planning guidance such as keeping shipyards efficiently employed, limiting the average and/or maximum age of platforms, and meeting Integrated Warfare Architecture (IWAR) requirements. Without CIPA, such alternatives must be manually assembled-a slow, laborious, demanding task fraught with opportunities for clerical error. CIPA offers a graphical interface to organize planning data, accepts ad hoc manual guidance, optimally completes the missing details of any alternate scenario in a second or two, displays its recommendations and their consequences, and provides scenario cataloging and comparison tools. CIPA reduces to minutes the planning cycle from exigent question to exploratory scenarios to PowerPoint slides displaying results. This document describes the planning environment into which CIPA has been introduced, how CIPA works, and shows how CIPA is used.