The Defence problem space has expanded considerably in recent years, with the operating environment now ranging from cooperation through to conflict, often with blurred boundaries in between. Additionally, the physical domains of air, land and sea have been expanded to include information and cyber and space. Defence seeks new sources of adversarial advantage to prevail in this contested environment. New operations analysis approaches are required to provide meaningful evidence-based decision-support associated with this problem space.

The patrol boat scheduling problem with complete coverage (PBSPCC) is concerned with scheduling a minimum size fleet of resource-constrained vessels to provide ongoing continuous coverage over a set of maritime patrol regions. The problem is complicated by the necessity for patrol vessels to visit replenishment stations (ports) on a regular basis for mandatory resource replenishment. This problem, which is applicable to maritime border protection and surveillance operations, has its origins in fleet sizing questions raised by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and has been a subject of interest for the authors since 2008.

Defence experimentation brings significant value, but also significant overheads. Therefore to achieve rapid development it is important to strike a balance between working on real systems and surrogate systems (when there is a straightforward translation to Defence systems and/or scenario). The emergency services domain is one such non-Defence surrogate system offering significant potential to mitigate many of these overheads.