Human and material resource planning is one representative example of Operations Research. Resource planning is important not only in civilian settings but also in military ones. In the Air Force, flight scheduling is one of the primary issues that must be addressed by the personnel who are connected to flight missions. However, although the topic is of great importance, relatively few studies have attempted to resolve the problem on a scientific basis. Each flight squadron has its own scheduling officers who manually draw up the flight schedules each day. While mistakes may not occur while drafting schedules, officers may experience difficulties in systematically adjusting to them. To increase efficiency in this context, this study proposes a mathematical model based on a binary variable. This model automatically drafts flight schedules considering pilot’s mission efficiency. Furthermore, it also recommends that schedules be drawn up monthly and updated weekly, rather than being drafted from scratch each day. This will enable easier control when taking the various relevant factors into account. The model incorporates several parameters, such as matching of the main pilots and co-pilots, turn around time, availability of pilots and aircraft, monthly requirements of each flight mission, and maximum/minimum number of sorties that would be flown per week. The optimal solution to this model demonstrated an average improvement of nearly 47% compared with other feasible solutions.

We consider a satellite mission scheduling problem, which is a promising problem in recent satellite industry. This problem has various considerations such as customer importance, due date, limited capacity of energy and memory, distance of the location of each mission, etc. Also we consider the objective of each satellite such as general purpose satellite, strategic mission and commercial satellite. And this problem can be modelled as a general knapsack problem, which is famous NP-hard problem, if the objective is defined as to maximize the total mission score performed. To solve this kind of problem, heuristic algorithm such as taboo and genetic algorithm are applied and their performance are acceptable in some extent. To propose more efficient algorithm than previous research, we applied a particle swarm optimization algorithm, which is the most promising method in optimization problem recently in this research. Owing to limitation of current study in obtaining real information and several assumptions, we generated 200 satellite missions with required information for each mission. Based on generated information, we compared the results by our approach algorithm with those of CPLEX. This comparison shows that our proposed approach give us almost accurate results as just less than 3% error rate, and computation time is just a little to be applied to real problem. Also this algorithm has enough scalability by innate characteristic of PSO. We also applied it to mission scheduling problem of various class of satellite. The results are quite reasonable enough to conclude that our proposed algorithm may work in satellite mission scheduling problem.