Introduction of UXV assets into naval fleet architectures through an MILP based fleet modelling tool

Sammanfattning: The problem of fleet design and fleet modelling; for decades problems regarding determining fleet sizes and optimized routing problems have formed the groundwork into the fleet design and fleet optimization for a wide range of business sectors. In most of these problems only single entities or fixed design resources are optimized for a certain route and delivery objective based on minimizing operational costs. In the naval industry, there has been a growing need for numerical methods that are able to predict what kind of fleets, in terms of size and capabilities, would be suited to achieve certain operational needs. Further than that, for shipbuilders and designers, what kind of design requirements the individual vessel platforms in such a fleet must contain constitutes the bridge in translating operational needs to ship design and system integration requirements. Especially in an era where technology advances more quickly than it takes to design a naval vessel, creating tools that are able to predict something about future fleet resilience could become an effective asset for future naval fleet development. For this, studies that contribute to developing methods that can evaluate the combined effect of individual vessel platforms from a fleet perspective are still fairly limited. The overall goal of this study was to determine how the development and application of fleet modelling tools can contribute to designing naval fleets that are more robust against future threats and missions. The objective was to extend and build on a fleet modelling method based on Systems Engineering, that is able to generate fleet compositions and produce basic individual platform design requirements for early-stage design phases of naval fleets through scripted naval scenario's. The aim was to construct a functional numerical simulation model through Mixed Integer Linear programming and extend the abilities of the method to be able to include 'future' technologies, with UXV's receiving the main focus. The overall potential and results that the numerical model produces are interesting, through an optimization process it is able to build a fleet from a wide range of platform choices and deliver basic platform design requirements. Actual combat performance of the fleets that are generated, is debatable and needs to be further investigated and tested/verified through different means. The conclusion from the study is that to design future resilient fleets, more research and development is needed in the area of naval fleet modelling and simulation since the functionality of tools available can not overcome the amount of uncertainty that the future brings. Besides that, the method under review does make it able to generate interesting fleet combinations that could spark new ideas on how we could regard the future potential of uprising technology and their combined capabilities with naval vessel platforms.