PROJECTING MILITARY HOUSING NEEDS WITH DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

The Department of the Army must provide its personnel with acceptable housing within the vicinity of military installations. To achieve this housing goal, the Army must often enter into agreements for the construction of housing or for leasing of existing housing. Any housing construction or leasing request must be accompanied by a Segmented Housing Market Analysis (SHMA), a time-consuming and costly forecasting process that requires many manual labor tasks. As described elsewhere, a Housing Analysis System (HANS) was developed to support these tasks on a micro computer with very user-friendly computer programs. Recently, the original version of HANS has been modified and incorporated into a larger computer system now under development. At the heart of both the original and modified systems is a set of econometric and heuristic programming models that deliver the required analyses and evaluations. This paper describes these models, explains how they drive the modified HANS, and presents the results and benefits of the use of the modified computer system.