Setting a place at the table: ending insurgencies through the political process

This article argues that, under certain conditions, allowing insurgents into the political process – through elections or government posts – can be a useful tool in the peace process and can help end insurgencies. However, bringing insurgents into the political process is unlikely to end insurgencies on its own, particularly if insurgents, the government, or the population believes that force is still a viable means of defeating the opponent and changing the status quo. The article begins with a brief overview of the causes of insurgency and on conflict resolution for internal wars. The article then considers two examples of insurgents that have entered the political process – the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and Hezbollah in Lebanon – and the differing degrees of success in transforming these insurgents to non-violent participants in the political process. It concludes by suggesting how insurgents can be brought into the political process as part of conflict resolution and the implications for Afghanistan.     

A mathematical formulation and efficient heuristics for the dynamic container relocation problem

The container relocation problem (CRP) is concerned with emptying a single yard‐bay which contains J containers each following a given pickup order so as to minimize the total number of relocations made during their retrieval process. The CRP can be modeled as a binary integer programming (IP) problem and is known to be NP‐hard. In this work, we focus on an extension of the CRP to the case where containers are both received and retrieved from a single yard‐bay, and call it the dynamic container relocation problem. The arrival (departure) sequences of containers to (from) the yard‐bay is assumed to be known a priori. A binary IP formulation is presented for the problem. Then, we propose three types of heuristic methods: index based heuristics, heuristics using the binary IP formulation, and a beam search heuristic. Computational experiments are performed on an extensive set of randomly generated test instances. Our results show that beam search heuristic is very efficient and performs better than the other heuristic methods.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 101–118, 2014     

高精度高分辨率WENO格式分析与改进

高精度、高分辨率计算格式对提高超声速复杂流场的计算水平有重要的意义。WENO格式是在ENO格式基础上发展起来的一类新型高精度、高分辨率格式,本文在格式加权算法理论和数值分析的基础,对加权算法进行了改进,通过模型问题应用可以看出:改进后格式权值的计算更为光滑,仍具有高精度、高分辨率的性质,并克服了随网格变化而出现的波动现象。     

一种新的高分辨极化目标检测方法

针对宽带毫米波高分辨雷达体制 ,研究了杂波环境中的目标检测问题。提出了极化域线性积累滤波的思路以提高雷达接收信号的信杂比 ,在此基础上利用宽带波形固有的径向高分辨力对目标进行一维距离成像 ,估计出回波中强散射点的数量和分布 ,通过对不同径向分辨单元内的强散射点进行整体检测 ,可进一步有效地提高信杂比 ,改善雷达的检测性能。最后在毫米波段的实验仿真结果表明该方法是一种非常有效的扩展目标检测方法     

Institutions,information, and commitment: the role of democracy in conflict

This paper explores the hypothesis that both the preexisting quality of democracy in a polity at the onset of conflict and the quality of democracy expected to emerge in the aftermath influence the likelihood of civil war. An empirical investigation of the hypothesis presents a challenge due to concerns of endogeneity and selection: the post-conflict level of democracy is endogenous to the pre-conflict level. Further, for a given time period, either a number of countries have not experienced civil war; or if they did, did not resolve the conflict. We overcome this selection bias by implementing a three-step extension to the Heckman procedure using an unbalanced cross-country panel of 77 countries over the period 1971–2005. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that a standard deviation improvement in the existing level of democracy reduces the probability of civil war by approximately 9 percentage points and a corresponding improvement in expected post-conflict democratization increases the probability of conflict by approximately 48 percentage points.     

Cyclic best first search: Using contours to guide branch‐and‐bound algorithms

The cyclic best‐first search (CBFS) strategy is a recent search strategy that has been successfully applied to branch‐and‐bound algorithms in a number of different settings. CBFS is a modification of best‐first search (BFS) that places search tree subproblems into contours which are collections of subproblems grouped in some way, and repeatedly cycles through all non‐empty contours, selecting one subproblem to explore from each. In this article, the theoretical properties of CBFS are analyzed for the first time. CBFS is proved to be a generalization of all other search strategies by using a contour definition that explores the same sequence of subproblems as any other search strategy. Further, a bound is proved between the number of subproblems explored by BFS and the number of children generated by CBFS, given a fixed branching strategy and set of pruning rules. Finally, a discussion of heuristic contour‐labeling functions is provided, and proof‐of‐concept computational results for mixed‐integer programming problems from the MIPLIB 2010 database are shown. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 64: 64–82, 2017     

无人机感知避让技术分析

无人机的安全性能特别是防相撞能力是影响无人机发展的一个重要因素,无人机感知避让技术是防止无人机发生相撞事故的重要保证。为了解和发展无人机感知避让技术,从无人机空中态势感知、飞行冲突预测和飞行冲突解脱3个方面对当前感知避让技术的研究现状进行了总结介绍,探讨了无人机防相撞工作的发展趋势。     

使用三个数域的数域筛算法

大整数分解难题是RSA密码的数学安全基础.目前数域筛算法是分解365比特以上大整数的最有效方法,然而它的时间复杂度仍然是亚指数的.对于目前普遍使用的1024比特以上大整数,数域筛算法还不能分解,所以研究数域筛算法具有重要的意义.现有的一般数域筛算法普遍使用两个数域,对多个数域的研究极少.一般数域筛算法经过修改可以使用三个数域,即两个代数数域和一个有理数域.分析表明:修改后的数域筛算法与原来的一般数域筛算法在时间复杂度上处于同一量级.但修改后的数域筛算法有更多地方可以合并计算,所以计算速度更快了.通过两个实验也验证了这一结论.     

CDF9／7小波在JPEG2000中的整数变化

通过添加系数缩放值叮,使目前在JPEG2000中广泛采用的CDF9／7小波提升算法完全整数化,不仅保持了现有算法的还原度,而且简化了算法的复杂度,在图像压缩上取得了比较满意的效果。     

Modeling and analyzing multiple station baggage screening security system performance

In the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001, numerous changes have been made to aviation security policy and operations throughout the nation's airports. The allocation and utilization of checked baggage screening devices is a critical component in aviation security systems. This paper formulates problems that model multiple sets of flights originating from multiple stations (e.g., airports, terminals), where the objective is to optimize a baggage screening performance measure subject to a finite amount of resources. These measures include uncovered flight segments (UFS) and uncovered passenger segments (UPS). Three types of multiple station security problems are identified and their computational complexity is established. The problems are illustrated on two examples that use data extracted from the Official Airline Guide. The examples indicate that the problems can provide widely varying solutions based on the type of performance measure used and the restrictions imposed by the security device allocations. Moreover, the examples suggest that the allocations based on the UFS measure also provide reasonable solutions with respect to the UPS measure; however, the reverse may not be the case. This suggests that the UFS measure may provide more robust screening device allocations. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.