Ministry of Defence Future Submarine Training School Resource Planning
The MoD provides the defence capability for the UK and acts as a specialist training supplier for service people across all of the three armed services.
The objective was to rationalise training, currently conducted at multiple sites, onto a single training site. The site was under construction and was to represent a substantially reduced footprint than previously spread across multiple sites. This rationalisation was to enable the sharing of estate and human resources across different training functions. The training requirements, both current and future, would determine the development of the infrastructure and capacity. To establish the viability of current planning, accurate modelling of the training requirements was required to determine bottlenecks and surplus capacity.
To carry out accurate modelling the training requirements, determination of course requirements and instructor skill sets and availability, along with infrastructure capabilities was needed. Data for training courses represented almost 100,000 hours of training within a year. Whilst every hour represented a changing requirement in instructor qualifications, room capacities, equipment and IT infrastructure demand. The challenge of effectively modelling and optimising the development of infrastructure and other training resources to effectively meet the brief was too complex for any human planners.
To support the development of training and de-risking the infrastructure construction, rigorous data capture and scheduling was required to determine the ability of the Training School to meet the training demand within the proposed physical estate. EventMAP used their scheduling software which captured room capacity, equipment, instructor training and IT infrastructure requirements to effectively model the total proposed training requirement and determine where resource requirements exceeded availability and where significant over capacity might be found.
The optimisation of course schedules was then conducted to minimise resource usage and determine areas where key resource limitations were preventing optimal overall resource utilisation. This identified small changes in bottlenecked resources that had a substantial effect on the overall resource utilisation. The ability to accurately model and quickly identify these areas allows resources to be focused most effectively. Rapid schedule optimisation via EventMAP software enabled the MOD to quickly iterate through possible schedules and scenarios and identify possible changes to resource availability and course constraints.
The delivery of the revised schedules to test optimisation of all the component parts in the delivery of training showed that the complete plan of future submarine training could not be fully met with the current infrastructure plan. More specifically it allowed the identification of key room types and equipment needed to provide and meet the future training demand. In addition, key instructor skill sets were also shown to be short supply to enable the MOD to target increases in instructor training in the medium term to meet future requirements. The modelling also identified opportunities to optimise the overall utilisation of classrooms, by increasing the number of smaller classrooms to match actual class sizes used in training delivery resulting in an efficient use and utilisation of total available space on site. Finally, the modelling revealed the need to increase the availability of IT resources in reconfigurable training and meeting rooms to ensure an increased utilisation of the spaces in whatever configuration it was being used for the delivery of training.
In effect, the combination of resource usage data produced during the schedule optimisations enabled informed data-based proposals to be made and assisted in directing the delivery of the new site both in physical terms and training optimised delivery. The project identified the need for future infrastructure planning and delivery to include ongoing scheduling and modelling to ensure the creation of a well optimised training infrastructure is created.
Images: Ministry of Defence (OGL)
