Abstract: The pre-storage and pre-setting of maintenance materials are important for forming combat effectiveness rapidly in the early stages of a war. Methods for determining the pre-storage location and preparing distribution of maintenance materials for army equipment are thus proposed. To obtain the globally optimal solutions, the location of pre-storage facilities and the pre-setting of materials are integrated into a combinatorial scheduling problem. A MILP model is proposed to minimize the weighted sum of the fixed costs of pre-storage facilities, transportation costs, and tardiness penalties. An efficient logic-based Benders decomposition algorithm is developed to solve the problem. Numerical experiments based on 160 randomly generated instances show the superiority of the proposed algorithm in obtaining optimal solutions. At the same time, the comparison between the combinatorial and traditional sequential methods verify that the former can generate solutions with higher quality. The model and algorithms proposed may provide a basis for the decision-making process regarding the pre-storage and pre-setting of maintenance materials for military equipment during wartime.

Key words: equipmentsupport, equipmentmaintenancematerials, pre-storageandpre-setting, schedulingandlocation, logic-basedBendersdecomposition