October 2000 Newsletter - Naval Postgraduate School

STUDENT RESEARCH
OPTIMIZATION OF UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS OFFICER CAREER PATH SELECTION
Major Peter B. Baumgarten, United States Marine Corps
Master of Science in Operations Research-September 2000
Advisors: Associate Professor Siriphong Lawphongpanich
and Research Assistant Professor Alexandra Newman,
Department of Operations Research
The Marine Corps Manpower System is responsible for
managing the Marine officer inventory. The system’s
primary objective is to maximize the Marine Corps’ operational
readiness through the assignment of officers to billets.
While striving to fulfill billet requirements, the manpower
system simultaneously develops the professional skills, or
core competencies, that each officer must possess to be
assigned to billets requiring more authority and responsibility.
Therefore, officer careers (or career paths) must reflect a
balance between fulfilling billet requirements and developing
core competencies. Currently, Marine Corps manpower
planners lack rigorous methods to assist them in understanding
the effects of various personnel policy decisions
on the average officer career path or the system’s ability to
meet future billet requirements.
To assist these planners, this thesis presents an integer
program, the Officer Career Path Selection (OCPS)
model. The goal of OCPS is to assign officers to acceptable
career paths in order to best meet billet requirements
while satisfying, among others, core competency and tour
length constraints. This thesis uses data from the Infantry
Marine Occupational Specialty (MOS) to illustrate that
outputs from OCPS provide useful information regarding
the number of annual Infantry officer accessions and the
effects of potential manpower policy decisions. (Major
Baumgarten is the recipient of the Military Operations
Research Society Stephen A. Tisdale Graduate Research
Award.)
EXPLORATION OF FIBRE CHANNEL AS AN AVIONICS INTERCONNECT FOR 21ST CENTURY
MILITARY AIRCRAFT
LCDR Shawn Hendricks, United States Navy
Master of Science in Aeronautical Engineering and
Aeronautical Engineer-June 2000
Advisors: Associate Professor Russ Duren, Department of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Assistant Professor John
McEachen, Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering
Avionics architectures are evolving from “Federated” systems
consisting of highly specialized black boxes connected together
via MIL-STD-1553 and ARINC 429 data buses to
“Integrated” and “Distributed” architectures. These new
architectures contain high data-rate sensors, parallel
processors, and shared memory with high levels of
integration. These systems require a new interconnection
system that overcomes the limitations of
older standards. One such interconnection system is
Fibre Channel. This thesis evaluates Fibre Channel
as an avionics interconnection standard. It begins by
defining the requirements and measures of performance
for an interconnection system suitable for the
new avionics architectures. The requirements
address technical performance, affordability, reliability,
sustainability, and maintainability considerations.
The Fibre Channel standards are then compared to
the requirements for the avionics interconnection system. In
order to perform a technical performance evaluation of a
switched fabric avionics interconnection system, a computer
simulation model was developed. The OPNET Modeler®
tool from OPNET, Inc. was used to model the components of
an advanced avionics system. This tool allows multiple
system configurations to be defined and examined quickly;
showing both the advantages of one configuration over
another as well as potential problem areas. (LCDR Hendricks’
work was performed at the request of the Joint Strike Fighter
Program Office. The Fibre Channel standard is being
considered for use in the JSF avionics system.)
Oceanography doctoral candidate LT Fabrice Ardhuin,
French Navy, received the Outstanding Student Paper
Award from the American Geophysical Union for his
paper, “A Hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian Numerical Model
for Wave Evolution in Shallow Water.” The paper was
presented at the Fall Annual Meeting of the AGU. The
paper has since been accepted for publication in the
Journal of Physical Oceanography. LT Arduin is advised
by Associate Professor Tom Herbers, Research
Associate Professor Tim Stanton, and Oceanographer
William O’Reilly of the Department of Oceanography.
NPS Research page 22
October 2000