MAKING HISTORICAL SURVEYS OF STATES’ NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

In signalling its wish to participate in the Additional Protocol at an early stage, Sweden took several steps at the national level long before it actually ratified the protocol in May 2004. In 1998, the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) initiated a project to conduct a historical survey of Swedish nuclear weapons research for the period 1945–72. Sweden thus took an important step for the sake of transparency. SKI worked out a general model of how a nationally based survey could be designed, and gradually other states approached SKI in order to learn more about the methods and goals of the historical surveys. In 2002, a cooperative project was initiated between Sweden and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Finland joined the cooperative effort, and it thus became a dialogue and project carried out by five neighboring states to make national surveys. This article presents summaries of the national reports from Sweden and the Baltic states.     

Minimal forecast horizon procedures for dynamic lot size models

This article presents new results which should be useful in finding production decisions while solving the dynamic lot sizing problem of Wagner–Whitin on a rolling horizon basis. In a rolling horizon environment, managers obtain decisions for the first period (or the first few periods) by looking at the forecasts for several periods. This article develops procedures to find optimal decisions for any specified number of initial periods (called planning horizon in the article) by using the forecast data for the minimum possible number of future periods. Computational results comparing these procedures with the other procedures reported in the literature are very encouraging.     

Resource efficiency in aircraft production

This article examines measures of economic efficiency in aircraft production. In particular, a type of nonlinear frontier estimation is contrasted with more traditional methods for estimating a dynamic cost function. This cost function is grounded in economic theory, and it is consistent with knowledge of the aircraft-production process. The model includes the effects of both learning and production rate on total program costs. The usefulness of the model is demonstrated with an example that relates to the acquisition of military equipment. It is shown through various sensitivity analyses that an alternative procurement policy for an aircraft program could have resulted in increased efficiency and hence a lower total program cost to the government.     

Exact algorithms for integrated facility location and production planning problems

We consider a class of facility location problems with a time dimension, which requires assigning every customer to a supply facility in each of a finite number of periods. Each facility must meet all assigned customer demand in every period at a minimum cost via its production and inventory decisions. We provide exact branch‐and‐price algorithms for this class of problems and several important variants. The corresponding pricing problem takes the form of an interesting class of production planning and order selection problems. This problem class requires selecting a set of orders that maximizes profit, defined as the revenue from selected orders minus production‐planning‐related costs incurred in fulfilling the selected orders. We provide polynomial‐time dynamic programming algorithms for this class of pricing problems, as well as for generalizations thereof. Computational testing indicates the advantage of our branch‐and‐price algorithm over various approaches that use commercial software packages. These tests also highlight the significant cost savings possible from integrating location with production and inventory decisions and demonstrate that the problem is rather insensitive to forecast errors associated with the demand streams. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Damage functions and estimates of fratricide and collateral damage

There are multiple damage functions in the literature to estimate the probability that a single weapon detonation destroys a point target. This paper addresses differences in the tails of four of the more popular damage functions. These four cover the asymptotic tail behaviors of all monotonically decreasing damage functions with well‐behaved hazard functions. The differences in estimates of probability of kill are quite dramatic for large aim‐point offsets. This is particularly important when balancing the number of threats that can be engaged with the chances of fratricide and collateral damage. In general, analysts substituting one damage function for another may badly estimate kill probabilities in offset‐aiming, which could result in poor doctrine. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 306–321, 2003.