Models for managing contingency construction operations

A contingency is a crisis situation such as a national disaster, civil disorder, or military invasion that creates a major threat to the safety and security of a population. Essentially all contingencies require construction support that is generally mission critical and inherently challenging due to the dynamics and uncertainty with the availability of resources and the demands for the projects. This paper considers a military contingency for which all construction projects must be completed within a fixed time to achieve mission success. The effectiveness in accomplishing the construction mission is based on mission time reliability assessed using the probability of interference between load measured in the number of days required for the project, and the capacity which is taken as the available allotted resources. Two models are developed to assist in managing the allocation of resources for the construction operations; one based on conditions of moderate risk with randomly occurring repetitive loads, and the other a Markov chain model for high risk conditions. Examples are provided.