A graph coloring approach to the deployment scheduling and unit assignment problem

We address one of the external factors of personnel inventory behavior, deployments. The configuration of persistent unit deployments has the ability to affect everything from individual perceptions of service palatability to operational effectiveness. There is little evidence to suggest any analytical underpinnings to the U.S. Army deployment scheduling and unit assignment patterns. This paper shows that the deployment scheduling and unit assignment problem can be formulated as an interval graph such that modifications to traditional graph coloring algorithms provide an efficient mechanism for dealing with multiple objectives.