Level product form QSF processes and an analysis of queues with Coxian interarrival distribution

In this article, we study a class of Quasi‐Skipfree (QSF) processes where the transition rate submatrices in the skipfree direction have a column times row structure. Under homogeneity and irreducibility assumptions we show that the stationary distributions of these processes have a product form as a function of the level. For an application, we will discuss the ‐queue that can be modeled as a QSF process on a two‐dimensional state space. In addition, we study the properties of the stationary distribution and derive monotonicity of the mean number of the customers in the queue, their mean sojourn time and the variance as a function of for fixed mean arrival rate. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logisticsxs 66:57–72, 2019     

考虑载荷作用次数的多失效模式扭力轴灵敏度分析

机械构件的不同的失效模式之间具有一定的相关性,而且随机载荷作用次数对机械构件的可靠性有一定程度的影响。因此对机械构件进行可靠性灵敏度分析时,需要充分考虑其不同失效模式和载荷作用次数的影响。通过运用顺序统计量理论考虑载荷多次作用以及多种失效模式条件下机械构件可靠性及可靠性灵敏度的变化规律,运用随机摄动理论和四阶矩技术,建立一种考虑载荷作用次数的多失效模式机械构件可靠性灵敏度分析数值方法的应力强度干涉模型。在随机变量前四阶矩已知的情况下,结合灵敏度分析的梯度算法,推导出关于随机变量均值和方差的灵敏度计算公式。以某履带车辆底盘扭力轴为例进行计算,得到其可靠度随载荷作用次数、随机变量均值和方差而改变的可靠性灵敏度变化曲线,为扭力轴的可靠性优化提供一定的理论依据。研究成果可以推广到相关机械可靠性灵敏度设计和结构优化领域,具有非常重要的实用意义。     

M/M/1 queues with interdependent arrival and service processes

We study via simulation an M/M/1 queueing system with the assumption that a customer's service time and the interarrival interval separating his arrival from that of his predecessor are correlated random variables having a bivariate exponential distribution. We show that positive correlation reduces the mean and variance of the total waiting time and that negative correlation has the opposite effect. By using spectral analysis and a nonparametric test applied to the sample power spectra associated with certain simulated waiting times we show the effect to be statistically significant.     

Capacity expansion with lead times and autocorrelated random demand

The combination of uncertain demand and lead times for installing capacity creates the risk of shortage during the lead time, which may have serious consequences for a service provider. This paper analyzes a model of capacity expansion with autocorrelated random demand and a fixed lead time for adding capacity. To provide a specified level of service, a discrete time expansion timing policy uses a forecast error‐adjusted minimum threshold level of excess capacity position to trigger an expansion. Under this timing policy, the expansion cost can be minimized by solving a deterministic dynamic program. We study the effects of demand characteristics and the lead time length on the capacity threshold. Autocorrelation acts similarly to randomness in hastening expansions but has a smaller impact, especially when lead times are short. However, the failure either to recognize autocorrelation or to accurately estimate its extent can cause substantial policy errors. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003     

Statistical analysis of exponential lifetimes under an adaptive Type‐II progressive censoring scheme

In this article, a mixture of Type‐I censoring and Type‐II progressive censoring schemes, called an adaptive Type‐II progressive censoring scheme, is introduced for life testing or reliability experiments. For this censoring scheme, the effective sample size m is fixed in advance, and the progressive censoring scheme is provided but the number of items progressively removed from the experiment upon failure may change during the experiment. If the experimental time exceeds a prefixed time T but the number of observed failures does not reach m, we terminate the experiment as soon as possible by adjusting the number of items progressively removed from the experiment upon failure. Computational formulae for the expected total test time are provided. Point and interval estimation of the failure rate for exponentially distributed failure times are discussed for this censoring scheme. The various methods are compared using Monte Carlo simulation. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

战略机遇期公共消防安全热点解析

在重要战略机遇期,消防工作保障和服务经济社会发展的作用更加凸显。在研判重要战略机遇期的消防安全形势任务的基础上,从解决制约消防工作的体制性、机制性和保障性问题入手,提出了加强和改革消防工作的对策措施。     

Production planning with resources subject to congestion

A fundamental difficulty in developing effective production planning models has been accurately reflecting the nonlinear dependency between workload and lead times. We develop a mathematical programming model for production planning in multiproduct, single stage systems that captures the nonlinear dependency between workload and lead times. We then use outer linearization of this nonlinear model to obtain a linear programming formulation and extend it to multistage systems. Extensive computational experiments validate the approach and compare its results to conventional models that assume workload‐independent planning lead times. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

经典与时代的契合——浅谈“中国文学史”融入式教学

教师在明晰了"中国文学史"教学目的之后,开展融经典于"中国文学史"课堂教学,将经典作家、作品背景与时代艺术特征相结合,不仅可以有效地处理文学史与文学作品导读课程之间的关系,并且可以在有限的课时量内提升学生对时代性文学特征的把握。     

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。     

The (s,Q) inventory model with Erlang lead time and deterministic demand

We develop a simple, approximately optimal solution to a model with Erlang lead time and deterministic demand. The method is robust to misspecification of the lead time and has good accuracy. We compare our approximate solution to the optimal for the case where we have prior information on the lead‐time distribution, and another where we have no information, except for computer‐generated sample data. It turns out that our solution is as easy as the EOQ's, with an accuracy rate of 99.41% when prior information on the lead‐time distribution is available and 97.54–99.09% when only computer‐generated sample information is available. Apart from supplying the inventory practitioner with an easy heuristic, we gain insights into the efficacy of stochastic lead time models and how these could be used to find the cost and a near‐optimal policy for the general model, where both demand rate and lead time are stochastic. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004     

清代边塞诗的时代特征及其个案论析

作为中国边塞诗史上继盛唐之后的第二个高峰期,清代边塞诗在反映地域、创作主体、表现内容等许多方面都有着明显的新变与深化,从而形成了其独有的时代特征,即反映地域的扩大化、创作取向的学者化和表现内容的民俗化。     

地空导弹反导作战拦截次数计算模型及仿真

在分析地空导弹武器系统拦截来袭目标过程的基础上,通过分析地空导弹发射区纵深建立了地空导弹武器系统可拦截次数模型.利用该模型可计算地空导弹武器系统对单个来袭目标在杀伤区内的拦截次数.仿真结果揭示了地空导弹武器系统在不同目标特性(速度、高度、航路捷径)下对目标的可拦截次数的影响.     

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     

Statistical tests for exponential service from m/g/1 waiting-time data

From an original motivation in quantitative inventory modeling, we develop methods for testing the hypothesis that the service times of an M/G/1 queue are exponentially distributed, given a sequence of observations of customer line and/or system waits. The approaches are mostly extensions of the well-known exponential goodness-of-fit test popularized by Gnedenko, which results from the observation that the sum of a random exponential sample is Erlang distributed and thus that the quotient of two independent exponential sample means is F distributed.     

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     

Operations sequencing for a multi‐stage production inventory system

This article studies operations sequencing for a multi‐stage production inventory system with lead times under predictable (deterministic) yield losses and random demand. We consider various cases with either full or partial release of work‐in‐process inventories, for either pre‐operation or post‐operation cost structures, and under either the total discounted or average cost criteria. We derive necessary and sufficient criteria for the optimal sequence of operations in all cases. While the criteria differ in their specific forms, they all lead to the same principal: those operations with (1) lower yields, (2) lower processing costs, (3) longer lead times, and (4) lower inventory holding costs should be placed higher upstream in the system.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 144–154, 2014     

Deterministic chaos in a model of discrete manufacturing

A natural extension of the bucket brigade model of manufacturing is capable of chaotic behavior in which the product intercompletion times are, in effect, random, even though the model is completely deterministic. This is, we believe, the first proven instance of chaos in discrete manufacturing. Chaotic behavior represents a new challenge to the traditional tools of engineering management to reduce variability in production lines. Fortunately, if configured correctly, a bucket brigade assembly line can avoid such pathologies. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Scheduling jobs with piecewise linear decreasing processing times

We study the problems of scheduling a set of nonpreemptive jobs on a single or multiple machines without idle times where the processing time of a job is a piecewise linear nonincreasing function of its start time. The objectives are the minimization of makespan and minimization of total job completion time. The single machine problems are proved to be NP‐hard, and some properties of their optimal solutions are established. A pseudopolynomial time algorithm is constructed for makespan minimization. Several heuristics are derived for both total completion time and makespan minimization. Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate their efficiency. NP‐hardness proofs and polynomial time algorithms are presented for some special cases of the parallel machine problems. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 531–554, 2003     

A bicriterion approach to common flow allowances due window assignment and scheduling with controllable processing times

We investigate a single‐machine scheduling problem for which both the job processing times and due windows are decision variables to be determined by the decision maker. The job processing times are controllable as a linear or convex function of the amount of a common continuously divisible resource allocated to the jobs, where the resource allocated to the jobs can be used in discrete or continuous quantities. We use the common flow allowances due window assignment method to assign due windows to the jobs. We consider two performance criteria: (i) the total weighted number of early and tardy jobs plus the weighted due window assignment cost, and (ii) the resource consumption cost. For each resource consumption function, the objective is to minimize the first criterion, while keeping the value of the second criterion no greater than a given limit. We analyze the computational complexity, devise pseudo‐polynomial dynamic programming solution algorithms, and provide fully polynomial‐time approximation schemes and an enhanced volume algorithm to find high‐quality solutions quickly for the considered problems. We conduct extensive numerical studies to assess the performance of the algorithms. The computational results show that the proposed algorithms are very efficient in finding optimal or near‐optimal solutions. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 64: 41–63, 2017     

Online process mean estimation using L1 norm exponential smoothing

A basic assumption in process mean estimation is that all process data are clean. However, many sensor system measurements are often corrupted with outliers. Outliers are observations that do not follow the statistical distribution of the bulk of the data and consequently may lead to erroneous results with respect to statistical analysis and process control. Robust estimators of the current process mean are crucial to outlier detection, data cleaning, process monitoring, and other process features. This article proposes an outlier‐resistant mean estimator based on the L₁ norm exponential smoothing (L₁‐ES) method. The L₁‐ES statistic is essentially model‐free and demonstrably superior to existing estimators. It has the following advantages: (1) it captures process dynamics (e.g., autocorrelation), (2) it is resistant to outliers, and (3) it is easy to implement. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009