The United States Navy spends billions of dollars annually on construction, refit and repair of ships and submarines. New construction is primarily contracted out to commercial shipyards, while refit and repair are handled using a combination of commercial yards and naval shipyards. The problem of developing schedules that make efficient use of resources is critical, both to control costs and to meet Navy needs within the available resources, be they time, dry dock space, or increasingly scarce skilled manpower. Both construction and maintenance are extremely complex processes, involving thousands of activities with thousands of constraints among them. This complexity makes it virtually impossible for people, even augmented by the commercial scheduling systems available today, to find good schedules. continue...

A presentation providing an executive summary of the resulting ARGOS shipyard scheduling optimization system is available.