The Air Mobility Command Deployment Analysis System (ADANS)

When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and President Bush ordered the deployment of the armed forces to the Persian Gulf region, the Military Airlift Command (MAC) began the largest airlift in history. A typical airlift mission carrying troops and cargo to the Persian Gulf required a three-day round-trip, visited seven or more different airfields, burned almost one million pounds of fuel, and cost $750,000. During Operation Desert Storm, MAC originated more than 120 such missions daily. By September 1991, 20,000 missions had delivered more than 800,000 passengers and 650,000 tons of cargo to the Persian Gulf region. Each mission required scheduling aircraft, crew, and mission support resources to maximize the on-time delivery of cargo and passengers. To meet this challenge, MAC worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop and deploy the Airlift Flow Planning component of the Airlift Deployment Analysis System (ADANS.) In less than three months, ADANS provided a set of decision support tools to manage information on cargo and passengers to be moved and the available airlift resources, as well as tools to schedule missions, to analyze the schedules, and to distribute the schedule to MAC’s worldwide command and control system.

Following Operation Desert Storm, the Military Airlift Command was reorganized to include air refueling as well as airlift resources, becoming the Air Mobility Command (AMC). The ADANS acronym was re-envisioned as the AMC Deployment Analysis System and tools to support the scheduling and management of air refueling assets were incorporated into the system.

Research followed to develop specialized tools to assess courses of action and to provide quick estimates of resource requirements and capabilities based on the limited information available in the early phases of an operation. Ultimately, a suite of planning, scheduling and schedule analysis tools were incorporated into ADANS to provide automated support throughout the planning and scheduling process. The more efficient ADANS scheduling tools enable the flow planners to make a transition from their reactive posture to a proactive stance by providing them with more time to evaluate the quality of their air mobility schedules. The goal of ADANS is to improve AMC’s ability to respond to crises quickly and effectively anywhere in the world.

Adapting to the changing needs of the command, both through crisis and planned transitions, has been possible due to ORNL’s evolutionary prototyping approach to system development and the resources available at ORNL to address the requirements of the Air Mobility Command.