Coalition Modeling in Humanitarian Assistance Operations

Multinational operations are carried out to achieve military and diplomatic objectives in various regions. Such operations derive a great deal of benefits from sharing budgets, political legitimacy, sharing each national experience and technological resources, and so forth. However, a coalition, one structure of multinational operations, often involves serious challenges in such areas as command and control, logistic support, communication and language, training, and intelligence and information due to its ad hoc characteristics. This research reviews general problems in a coalition operation, and develops the Coalition Operation Planning Model to assist coalition commanders or staff in producing an efficient operational plan. In this model, goal programming is employed to formulate the coalition problems with multiple objectives. The proposed model is composed of three sub-models: the Coalition Mission-Unit Allocation Model, the Coalition Mission-Support Model, and the Coalition Mission-Unit Grouping Model. The first sub-model is designed to find an optimized resource allocation by applying the shortest path problem and effectiveness functions. The second sub-model is developed to obtain an optimized logistics support plan by using the multi-commodity network flow.