Spares stocking policies for repairable items with dependent repair times

This paper analyzes the problem of determining desirable spares inventory levels for repairable items with dependent repair times. The problem is important for repairable products such as aircraft engines which can have very large investment in spares inventory levels. While existing models can be used to determine optimal inventory spares levels when repair times are independent, the practical considerations of limited repair shop capacity and prioritized shop dispatching rules combine to make repair times not independent of one another. In this research a simulation model of a limited capacity repair facility with prioritized scheduling is used to explore a variety of heuristic approaches to the spares stocking decision. The heuristics are also compared with use of a model requiring independent repair times (even though that assumption is not valid here). The results show that even when repair time dependencies are present, the performance of a model which assumes independent repair times is quite good.     

Damage of multi-layer spaced metallic target plates impacted by radial layered PELE

Three different kinds of PELE (the penetrator with lateral efficiency) were launched by ballistic artillery to impact the multi-layer spaced metal target plates. The impact velocities of the projectiles were measured by the velocity measuring system. The damage degree and process of each layer of target plate impacted by the three kinds of projectiles were analyzed. The experimental results show that all the three kinds of projectiles have the effect of expanding holes on the multi-layer spaced metal target plates. For the normal structure PELE(without layered) with tungsten alloy jacket and the radial layered PELE with tungsten alloy jacket, the diameters of holes on the second layer of plates are 3.36 times and 3.76 times of the diameter of the projectile, respectively. For radial layered PELE with W/Zr-based amorphous composite jacket, due to the large number of tungsten wires dispersed after the impact, the diameter of the holes on the four-layer spaced plates can reach 2.4 times, 3.04 times, 5.36 times and 2.68 times of the diameter of the projectile. Besides, the normal structure PELE with tungsten alloy jacket and the radial layered PELE whit tungsten alloy jacket formed a large number of fragments impact marks on the third target plate. Although the number of fragments penetrating the third target plate is not as large as that of the normal structure PELE, the area of dispersion of fragments impact craters on the third target plate is larger by the radial layered PELE. The radial layered PELE with W/Zr-based amorphous composite jacket released a lot of heat energy due to the impact of the matrix material, and formed a large area of ablation marks on the last three target plates.     

Strategic investment to reduce setup times in the economic lot scheduling problem

This article considers the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem where setup times and costs can be reduced by an initial investment that is amortized over time. The objective is to determine a multiple-item single facility cyclic schedule to minimize the long run average holding and setup costs plus the amortized investment. We develop a lower bound on the long run average inventory carrying and setup costs as a function of the setup times, and show that this lower bound is increasing concave on the setup times when the out-of-pocket setup costs are zero or proportional to the setup times. We then develop a model that may be helpful in deciding the magnitude and the distribution of a one-time investment in reducing the setup times when the investment is amortized over time. Numerical results based on randomly generated problems, and on Bomberger's ten item problem indicate that significant overall savings are possible for highly utilized facilities. Most of the savings are due to a significant reduction in the long run average holding cost. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Heuristic solution to a discrete collection model

A discrete time Collection Model is formulated, involving the completion of a touring objective on a network with stochastic node states. Heuristic touring strategies are constructed, there being as yet inadequate analytic results for its optimal solution. Effectiveness of the heuristics is assessed by comparing expected tour times under the heuristics with expected tour times given perfect information. A branch and bound algorithm is presented for computing the perfect information tour times.     

A simulated port facility in a theatre of operations

A hypothetical port facility in a theatre of operations is modeled and coded in a special purpose simulation language, for the purpose of conducting simulation experiments on a digital computer. The experiments are conducted to investigate the resource requirements necessary for the reception, discharge, and clearance of supplies at the port. Queue lengths, waiting times, facility utilizations, temporary storage levels, and ship turn-around times are analyzed as functions of transportation and cargo handling resources, using response surface methodology. The resulting response surfaces are revealing in regard to the sensitivity of port operations to transportation resource levels and the characteristics of the port facility's load factor. Two specific conclusions of significant value are derived. First, the simulation experiments clearly show that the standard procedures for determining discharge and clearance capacities take insufficient account of the effects of variability. Second, the response surfaces for ship turn-around times and temporary storage levels indicate that an extremely steep gradient exists as a function of troop levels.     

纳微米材料影响环氧涂层耐磨性的试验研究

为了提高环氧粘涂层的耐磨性,本试验通过在环氧胶粘剂中加入纳、微米填料,研究了纳微米填料对环氧胶粘剂涂层耐磨性的影响规律。试验结果表明,加入纳米级填料环氧胶粘剂涂层的相对耐磨性明显优于微米级填料;加入纳微米复合填料其相对耐磨性为正火态45钢的2.57倍,和纯环氧胶粘剂涂层相比,提高幅度可达2.85倍,而仅加入纳米填料的胶粘剂,其涂层耐磨性只增加了1.97倍。     

二级库存-运输系统的联合经济订购模型

结合器材供应的实际,构建了一个国家仓库-地区仓库形成的二级库存-运输系统,以最低费用为目标,建立了该系统的联合经济订购模型,求解了该系统各仓库的最佳订货量和订货次数;运用该模型对3种订货策略（年度1次订货、年度多次订货、零库存订货）进行了算例验证,表明了该模型在优化多级库存运输系统订货参数方面的意义。     

广告语言中“以我为本”现象初探

随着科学技术的发展和信息交流的便利,大众传媒对人们生活的影响是不言而喻的,而媒介语言更是时时刻刻充斥于我们的日常生活。本文正是想把握这一时代特色,以媒介语言中的广告语言为载体,以广告语言中的"以我为本"现象为研究对象,并通过对这一现象的研究来探讨语言发展与时代发展的关系,来分析语言的外在表现形式与人们内在心理特点的关系。     

Scheduling on M parallel machines subject to random breakdowns to minimize expected mean flow time

The problem of scheduling n jobs on m parallel machines is considered when the machines are subject to random breakdowns and job processing times are random variables. An objective function of mean flow time is developed for a general parallel machine system, and an expression of its expected value is derived. The problem is transformed into a deterministic unrelated parallel machine scheduling model with modified processing times when the number of breakdowns is modeled as a generalized Poisson process. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

从部队视角看公安现役院校发展之路

公安现役院校是培养公安现役部队各类人才的重要基地,要走出一条符合时代特点和适应形势任务需要的科学发展之路,必须以科学发展观为指导,坚持与时俱进,在把握职责使命上要有新思路,在创新发展模式上要有新理念,在解决突出问题上要有新进展,从而有效提升教学质量和办学水平。     

Performance evaluation of a production/inventory system with periodic review and endogenous lead times

This paper considers a discrete time, single item production/inventory system with random period demands. Inventory levels are reviewed periodically and managed using a base‐stock policy. Replenishment orders are placed with the production system which is capacitated in the sense that there is a single server that sequentially processes the items one at a time with stochastic unit processing times. In this setting the variability in demand determines the arrival pattern of production orders at the queue, influencing supply lead times. In addition, the inventory behavior is impacted by the correlation between demand and lead times: a large demand size corresponds to a long lead time, depleting the inventory longer. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we present an exact procedure based on matrix‐analytic techniques for computing the replenishment lead time distribution given an arbitrary discrete demand distribution. Second, we numerically characterize the distribution of inventory levels, and various other performance measures such as fill rate, base‐stock levels and optimal safety stocks, taking the correlation between demand and lead times into account. Third, we develop an algorithm to fit the first two moments of the demand and service time distribution to a discrete phase‐type distribution with a minimal number of phases. This provides a practical tool to analyze the effect of demand variability, as measured by its coefficient of variation, on system performance. We also show that our model is more appropriate than some existing models of capacitated systems in discrete time. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

On the (S-1, S) inventory model under compound poisson demands and i.i.d. unit resupply times

We analyze an (S-1, S) inventory model with compound Poisson demands. Resupply times for individual units are independent and identically distributed. Such a model can also be characterized as an M^X/G/∞ queue. We derive expressions of performance measure such as the steady-state distribution and the expectation of the number of backlogged units. In addition, numerical examples are included to reflect the effects of i.i.d. unit resupply times. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Techniques for establishing ergodic and recurrence properties of continuous-valued markov chains

We present techniques for classifying Markov chains with a continuous state space as either ergodic or recurrent. These methods are analogous to those of Foster for countable space chains. The theory is presented in the first half of the paper, while the second half consists of examples illustrating these techniques. The technique for proving ergodicity involves, in practice, three steps: showing that the chain is irreducible in a suitable sense; verifying that the mean hitting times on certain (usually bounded) sets are bounded, by using a “mean drift” criterion analogous to that of Foster; and finally, checking that the chain is such that bounded mean hitting times for these sets does actually imply ergodicity. The examples comprise a number of known and new results: using our techniques we investigate random walks, queues with waiting-time-dependent service times, dams with general and random-release rules, the s-S inventory model, and feedback models.     

移动电站整机性能自动测试仪的研制

本文研究将分布式双处理器控制技术应用于移动电站性能测试中,构成移动电站整机性能参数自动测试仪,该测试仪比传统测试方法提高效率8～10倍,且操作简便。     

Sensitivity curves for effective project management

A key problem in project management is to decide which activities are the most important to manage and how best to manage them. A considerable amount of literature has been devoted to assigning “importance” measures to activities to help with this important task. When activity times are modeled as random variables, these activity importance measures are more complex and difficult to use. A key problem with all existing measures is that they summarize the importance in a single number. The result is that it is difficult for managers to determine a range of times for an activity that might be acceptable or unacceptable. In this paper, we develop sensitivity curves that display the most useful measures of project performance (in terms of schedule) as a function of an activity's time. The structure of the networks allows us to efficiently estimate these curves for all desired activities, all desired time ranges, and all desired measures in a single set of simulation runs. The resulting curves provide insights that are not available when considering summarized measures alone. Chief among these insights is the ability to identify an acceptable range of times for an activity that will not lead to negative scheduling consequences. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 481–497, 2003     

Analyzing availability using transfer function models and cross spectral analysis

If we look at the literature of reliability and life testing we do not see much on the use of the powerful methods of time series analysis. In this paper we show how the methods of multivariate time series analysis can be used in a novel way to investigate the interrelationships between a series of operating (running) times and a series of maintenance (down) times of a complex system. Specifically, we apply the techniques of cross spectral analysis to help us obtain a Box-Jenkins type transfer function model for the running times and the down times of a nuclear reactor. A knowledge of the interrelationships between the running times and the down times is useful for an evaluation of maintenance policies, for replacement policy decisions, and for evaluating the availability and the readiness of complex systems.     

Estimating failure time distribution and its parameters based on intermediate data from a Wiener degradation model

Instead of measuring a Wiener degradation or performance process at predetermined time points to track degradation or performance of a product for estimating its lifetime, we propose to obtain the first‐passage times of the process over certain nonfailure thresholds. Based on only these intermediate data, we obtain the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator and uniformly most accurate confidence interval for the mean lifetime. For estimating the lifetime distribution function, we propose a modified maximum likelihood estimator and a new estimator and prove that, by increasing the sample size of the intermediate data, these estimators and the above‐mentioned estimator of the mean lifetime can achieve the same levels of accuracy as the estimators assuming one has failure times. Thus, our method of using only intermediate data is useful for highly reliable products when their failure times are difficult to obtain. Furthermore, we show that the proposed new estimator of the lifetime distribution function is more accurate than the standard and modified maximum likelihood estimators. We also obtain approximate confidence intervals for the lifetime distribution function and its percentiles. Finally, we use light‐emitting diodes as an example to illustrate our method and demonstrate how to validate the Wiener assumption during the testing. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Parallel machine scheduling: A probabilistic analysis

The minimum makespan of the general parallel machine scheduling problem with m machines and n jobs is studied. As for a number of other important combinatorial problems, the theory of empirical processes proves to be a very elegant and powerful tool for the probabilistic analysis of the solution value. It is used in this paper to derive a scheduling constant θ such that, for random processing times, the minimum makespan almost surely grows as θn when n goes to infinity. Moreover, a thorough probabilistic analysis is performed on the difference between the minimum makespan and θn. Explicit expressions for the scheduling constant are given for an arbitrary number of unrelated machines with identically distributed processing times (with an increasing failure rate), and for an arbitrary number of uniform machines and generally distributed processing times. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A branch‐and‐cut algorithm for the quay crane scheduling problem in a container terminal

The quay crane scheduling problem consists of determining a sequence of unloading and loading movements for cranes assigned to a vessel in order to minimize the vessel completion time as well as the crane idle times. Idle times originate from interferences between cranes since these roll on the same rails and a minimum safety distance must be maintained between them. The productivity of container terminals is often measured in terms of the time necessary to load and unload vessels by quay cranes, which are the most important and expensive equipment used in ports. We formulate the quay crane scheduling problem as a vehicle routing problem with side constraints, including precedence relationships between vertices. For small size instances our formulation can be solved by CPLEX. For larger ones we have developed a branch‐and‐cut algorithm incorporating several families of valid inequalities, which exploit the precedence constraints between vertices. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006     

State-dependent gap acceptance

This paper considers a traffic problem in which vehicles queue up according to a Poisson process on a single-lane entrance ramp prior to merging into a major stream of vehicular traffic. In order to then prevent the ramp queue from becoming too large, a model is proposed which considers a lowering of the critical gap as the ramp queue size increases. With the critical gap assumed to be a nonincreasing function of the number of vehicles on the ramp at instances that correspond to departure times of lead vehicles from the ramp queue, the resultant model is an M/G/1 queue with state-dependent service times. Some general results are obtained for this model and a specific case discussed in moderate detail.