A dynamic programming model for the initial entry training program of the United States Army

Each year, the US Army recruits and trains thousands of soldiers to fill vacancies in Army organizations. Installations responsible for training new recruits are located across the United States. Initial entry training for new recruits is conducted in two phases: basic combat training (BCT) followed by advanced individual training (AIT). Currently, manual heuristic methods, referred to as heuristics-used-in-practice (HUIP), are used to schedule basic training companies throughout the planning horizon to support initial entry training, where training company scheduling also involves deciding how many recruits to assign to training companies each week. In this paper we report our work on: (1) a mathematical dynamic model of BCT; and (2) a decision model for optimally scheduling basic training companies based on dynamic programming