EXCHANGE HEURISTICS TO IMPROVE THE CLARITY OF BASE TIME PLOTS

Motivated by a problem encountered by the Military Airlift Command (now replaced by the Air Transit Command), we developed a graphical system to display the movement of planes between bases over time. We next sought to improve the clarity of these base/time plots so that planners could better understand the information presented. Our approach was to first formulate an appropriate minimization problem and then examine and compare a variety of exchange heuristics (both old and new). Several diverse test problems were used. We found that some of the new procedures generated significantly better solutions than the standard exchange heuristics while requiring only slightly more computational effort.