Leaderless Global Jihadism: The Paradox of Discriminate Violence

Jihadist violence is typically associated with being particularly indiscriminate. Often, as in variations of the ‘new terrorism’ thesis, this characteristic is proposed to correspond in some way to its other attributes such as its globalised, decentralised and ‘postmodern’ religious nature. Recent work appears to give more substance to such claims, by claiming to show a relationship between indiscriminate violence and decentralised group organisation. However, in this paper we show, based on an analysis of jihadist targeting in Western Europe and America from 2001 to 2013, that targeting choices by jihadists unconnected to organised militant groups have in fact been consistently more, rather than less discriminate in their targeting choices than their better-integrated peers. Drawing on this finding, as well as a broader reading of jihadist targeting discourses, we argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between radicalisation, extremist ideology, decentralisation, and targeting choice.     

Heuristics for the location of inspection stations on a network

This article considers the preventive flow interception problem (FIP) on a network. Given a directed network with known origin‐destination path flows, each generating a certain amount of risk, the preventive FIP consists of optimally locating m facilities on the network in order to maximize the total risk reduction. A greedy search heuristic as well as several variants of an ascent search heuristic and of a tabu search heuristic are presented for the FIP. Computational results indicate that the best versions of the latter heuristics consistently produce optimal or near optimal solutions on test problems. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 287–303, 2000     

Two exact algorithms for the vehicle routing problem on trees

This article describes a heuristic and two exact algorithms for several classes of vehicle routing problems defined on tree networks. These include capacitated and time‐constrained vehicle routing problems. One of the exact algorithms is based on the computation of bin packing lower bounds. The other uses column generation. The first algorithm performs better on problems containing small customer demands and in which all vehicles are identical. Otherwise, the second algorithm is more powerful and more versatile. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 75–89, 1999     

Schedule design for liner services under vessel speed reduction incentive programs

Gas and particulate emissions from ship transportation have been increasing in recent years. In order to mitigate ship emissions near coastal areas, voluntary vessel speed reduction incentive programs (VSRIPs) were put in place by a number of ports. This paper studies a schedule design problem faced by liner shipping companies under VSRIPs. It proposes a mixed-integer nonlinear mathematical model for the minimization of the total cost, consisting of fuel cost, as well as operating cost, minus dockage refunds. The model balances three determinants, that is, the compliance of VSRIPs, the speed limit (the maximum physical speed of ships and the upper speed limit imposed by VSRIPs), and the limited number of ships. An enumerative algorithm and a piecewise-linear approximation algorithm are developed, based on some properties of the nonlinear model. The efficiency of the proposed algorithms is validated through extensive computational experiments.     

Clustered coverage orienteering problem of unmanned surface vehicles for water sampling

This study investigates a clustered coverage orienteering problem (CCOP), which is a generalization of the classical orienteering problem. The problem is widely motivated by the emerging unmanned techniques (eg, unmanned surface vehicles and drones) applied to environmental monitoring. Specifically, the unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are used to monitor reservoir water quality by collecting samples. In the CCOP, the water sampling sites (ie, the nodes) are grouped into clusters, and a minimum number of nodes must be visited in each cluster. With each node representing a certain coverage area of the water, the objective of the CCOP is to monitor as much as possible the total coverage area in one tour of the USV, considering that overlapping areas provide no additional information. An integer programming model is first formulated through a linearization procedure that captures the overlapping feature. A two-stage exact algorithm is proposed to obtain an optimal solution to the problem. The efficiency and effectiveness of the two-stage exact algorithm are demonstrated through experiments on randomly generated instances. The algorithm can effectively solve instances with up to 60 sampling sites.     

The strategic effects of a merger upon supplier interactions

We consider how a merger between two naturally differentiated dealers affects their interactions with a common supplier and identify conditions under which the merger can increase or decrease the combined net worth of the two firms. Among other things, we find that the attractiveness of merging depends upon the extent to which end demand can be stimulated by either an upstream supplier or the dealers. Specifically, the greater the supplier's ability to invest in stimulating end demand, the more likely it is that the naturally differentiated firms will be better off operating independently than merging. On the other hand, if the greatest opportunities for stimulating demand are through the service that is provided by the dealers, then merging their operations will be more attractive. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Scheduling and lot streaming in two‐machine open shops with no‐wait in process

We study the problem of minimizing the makespan in no‐wait two‐machine open shops producing multiple products using lot streaming. In no‐wait open shop scheduling, sublot sizes are necessarily consistent; i.e., they remain the same over all machines. This intractable problem requires finding sublot sizes, a product sequence for each machine, and a machine sequence for each product. We develop a dynamic programming algorithm to generate all the dominant schedule profiles for each product that are required to formulate the open shop problem as a generalized traveling salesman problem. This problem is equivalent to a classical traveling salesman problem with a pseudopolynomial number of cities. We develop and test a computationally efficient heuristic for the open shop problem. Our results indicate that solutions can quickly be found for two machine open shops with up to 50 products. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

The value of observing the condition of a deteriorating machine

We examine a small lot production setting in which a machine may go out of control and begin producing defective units. Traditionally, managers have had to rely upon observations of the quality of the output to determine whether the machine is in or out of control. However, with advances in technology such as vibration analysis, it is increasingly possible to obtain much more accurate information about the state of the machine. In this paper, we model and analyze a deteriorating machine in order to gain insight into the conditions under which investments in such technology are most beneficial. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 790–808, 1999     

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