Country survey XII: South Africa

This article examines the relationship between defence expenditure and economic performance in South Africa, both prior to and after that country's first fully democratic election in 1994. Prior to 1994 defence expenditure decisions were largely dominated by non‐economic factors; since then defence spending has declined in reaction to, inter alia, the need to address a number of socio‐economic inequities.

After 1975 in particular, military industrialisation in South Africa placed a disproportionately high burden on the country's industrial resources and natural economic and technical capabilities. However, although this suggests that the opportunity cost of domestic arms production has been fairly high, the country's poor economic and development performance since the mid‐1970s is a function of underlying structural deficiencies and institutional constraints rather than the consequence of inordinately high defence spending levels.     

Brazil's new defense paradigm

In 2015, Brazil has taken steps toward re-consolidating its domestic defense industry. In the 1980s, Brazil built a dynamic and diversified defense industry. The state-driven effort resulted in a tripod strategy, where the state, state-run companies, and their private sector became the pillars of Brazil's defense industry. Brazil developed an export-driven defense industry; where close to 80–90% of its output was exported to Latin American, African, Arab, and Asian nations. In the 1980s, Brazil became the world's fifth largest exporter of defense products and services, exporting to over 40 countries. In the 1990s and 2000s, Brazil's defense industry suffered a dramatic reduction in size, diversification, and momentum. Successions of domestic political and economic policies have relegated Brazil's once emerging defense industry to a marginal position in the global defense industry. This article analyzes future prospects, challenges, and growth strategies for Brazil's defense industry.     

工业企业火灾爆炸量化分析方法应用探讨

运用工业企业火灾爆炸量化分析方法对发生在韩国的一起液化石油气充装站火灾爆炸事故进行了量化分析.结果表明在沸腾液体扩展蒸气爆炸发生前的21 min时间内约有6.0t的丁烷泄漏并参与到池火燃烧中;丁烷槽车胶管与丁烷地下储罐管线之间的不良连接是导致丁烷泄漏的原因,其有效泄漏直径为27 mm;参与火球燃烧的丁烷为3.7t,约占沸腾液体扩展蒸气爆炸发生时槽车内剩余丁烷的62％;参与火球燃烧的丙烷为8.0t,约占丙烷槽车全部装载量的53％.     

日本防卫产业发展潜力问题分析

日本自卫队追求能力提升和活动范围扩大的努力受到其防卫产业发展的局限。防卫预算的有限直接导致防卫产业的市场规模狭小。部分核心技术自主研发的缺失限制了防卫产业独立发展的能力。融合式发展模式在成本核算、劳动生产率提升和产业发展稳定性等方面限制了防卫产业发展的潜力。     

The effects of customer rebates and retailer incentives on a manufacturer's profits and sales

In some industries such as automotive, production costs are largely fixed and therefore maximizing revenue is the main objective. Manufacturers use promotions directed to the end customers and/or retailers in their distribution channels to increase sales and market share. We study a game theoretical model to examine the impact of “retailer incentive” and “customer rebate” promotions on the manufacturer's pricing and the retailer's ordering/sales decisions. The main tradeoff is that customer rebates are given to every customer, while the use of retailer incentives is controlled by the retailer. We consider several models with different demand characteristics and information asymmetry between the manufacturer and a price discriminating retailer, and we determine which promotion would benefit the manufacturer under which market conditions. When demand is deterministic, we find that retailer incentives increase the manufacturer's profits (and sales) while customer rebates do not unless they lead to market expansion. When the uncertainty in demand (“market potential”) is high, a customer rebate can be more profitable than the retailer incentive for the manufacturer. With numerical examples, we provide additional insights on the profit gains by the right choice of promotion.© 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

国有军工集团生产与创新双效率研究

文章利用DEA方法对2015-2016年我国国有军工集团的生产效率和创新效率进行了分析,结果发现:我国国有军工集团的生产效率在近两年整体上有所提升,受行业影响小于自身因素影响,受管理、技术等水平的影响与来自规模因素的影响相差不大;创新效率在近两年整体上有所下降,受行业影响与自身因素影响均较大,无效率主要来自创新管理水平或技术条件的不足;生产效率与创新效率呈现统计上不显著的正相关关系。在此基础上,提出了军工集团实施国企改革的几点建议,以供有关方面参考。     

消防事业市场化初探

发挥社会力量办消防,发展消防中介组织,是引入资金、引入科技、普及消防知识、提高全民消防意识的重要一环.     

基于工控机的导弹指令系数测量方法

指令系数是防空导弹测试中比较重要的参数之一 ,通过对指令系数计算方法的分析 ,得出舵控信号起始采样时刻不会影响测量结果的结论 ,从而大大简化了测量系统的硬件结构和数据采集过程 ,提高了测量系统的稳定性 ,经过较长时间的应用表明 ,测量结果稳定性高 ,一致性好。     

Optimal job splitting on a multi‐slot machine with applications in the printing industry

In this article, we define a scheduling/packing problem called the Job Splitting Problem, motivated by the practices in the printing industry. There are n types of items to be produced on an m‐slot machine. A particular assignment of the types to the slots is called a “run” configuration and requires a setup cost. Once a run begins, the production continues according to that configuration and the “length” of the run represents the quantity produced in each slot during that run. For each unit of production in excess of demand, there is a waste cost. Our goal is to construct a production plan, i.e., a set of runs, such that the total setup and waste cost is minimized. We show that the problem is strongly NP‐hard and propose two integer programming formulations, several preprocessing steps, and two heuristics. We also provide a worst‐case bound for one of the heuristics. Extensive tests on real‐world and randomly generated instances show that the heuristics are both fast and effective, finding near‐optimal solutions. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

Optimal production ramp-up in the smartphone manufacturing industry

Motivated by challenges in the smartphone manufacturing industry, we develop a dynamic production ramp-up model that can be applied to economically satisfy nonstationary demand for short-life-cycle products by high-tech companies. Due to shorter life cycles and more rapid evolution of smartphones, production ramp-up has been increasingly critical to the success of a new smartphone. In the production ramp-up, the key challenge is to match the increasing capacity to nonstationary demand. The high-tech smartphone manufacturers are urged to jointly consider the effect of increasing capacity and decreasing demand. We study the production planning problem using a high-dimensional Markov decision process (MDP) model to characterize the production ramp-up. To address the curse of dimensionality, we refine Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm and theoretically analyze its convergence and computational complexity. In a real case study, we find that the MDP model achieves revenue improvement by stopping producing the existing product earlier than the benchmark policy. In synthetic instances, we validate that the proposed MCTS algorithm saves computation time without loss of solution quality compared with traditional value iteration algorithm. As part of the Lenovo production solution, our MDP model enables high-tech smartphone manufacturers to better plan the production ramp-up.