A steady state longitudinal manpower planning model with several classes by manpower

In the Navy's officer system there are several classes of manpower (e.g. pilots and submariners) that perform specialized jobs and also can perform several types of non-specialized jobs (e.g. military training, personnel management, etc.). This report is concerned with the general problem of allocating the different types of jobs among the several classes of manpower. The report describes a model that constructs a personnel inventory by rank for each of several manpower classes (pilots, etc.) and then allocates those people to the specialized and common jobs that they are allowed to do. The idea of the model is to allow a policy maker to quickly reconcile billet requirements with the reality of available accessions, job sharing targets between classes, and continuation rates of the different manpower classes. Different allocations can be produced either by assuming the values of a few key variables, or they can be generated using an optimization scheme that sets 'allowable' percentage errors. Four optimization variants based on this idea are described. The report contains some typical data, the results of calculations, and a description of computer programs used to solve the problem.