A Study On Wartime Sealift Operation Using Simulation

The ROK TRANSCOM is trying to establish a concrete wartime sealift operation plan. But there are many problems to be solved for setting up the plan. The most serious problem is to procure war materiel to be shipped in U.S.A and next one is to determine the number of sealift assets and to allocate them. The process of sealift operation can be described as follows. Before the order of vessel mobilization, all vessels appointed for activation would be scattered in worldwide in the state of Beaded or unloaded. After the order of vessel mobilization, vessels would go to SPGE(seaport of embarkation) to load war materiel. Some loaded ships should offload the commercial cargo to the near port as soon as they are activated, before they would go to SPOE. All vessels would load procured materiel in SPOE and then go to SPOD(seaport of debarkation). They would offload war materiel in SPOD and then go back to SPOE to load war materiel again. We will simulate this process using ARENA(1), evaluate the sealift capability of ROK and find omit problems of the sealift plan. This model ultimately evaluates the sealift capability and provides planners with critical information far establishing and correcting the plan. This study can also provide military planners with a flexible and accessible decision support tool to provide advance planning under a variety of conditions on the sealift capability. The military planner is expected to make use of this model as a standard for establishing effective and concrete sealift operation in the near future. We can conclude how procurement capability significantly affects the result of sealift operation through this model. We could decide the appropriate levee of sealift asset such as the number of vessels and the number of available berth. So we could allocate effectively the resources for completing the sealift operation within the TGT(Target) time.