Military Spending and Economic Growth: The Case of Iran

Over the last decade, the Iranian Government budget on military has been higher than the average of the world. The current increasing international sanctions aim to reduce the military capabilities and capacities of the Iranian Government. We analyze the response of the Iranian economy to shocks in its military budget from 1959 to 2007, using impulse response functions and variance decomposition analysis. The Granger causality results show that there is unidirectional causality from the military spending growth rate to the economic growth rate. The response of income growth to increasing shocks in the military budget is positive and statistically significant.     

Increasing of photostability of HNS explosive in the presence of UV photostabilizers

The photostabilies of hexanitrostillbene(HNS)were studied at 1％wt.of photostabilizers.The photo-stabilizers of Chiguard BP-12(UV-531),ADK STAB LA-326(UV-326),ADK STAB LA-32(UV-P),Irganox 1010 and Everstab LS944 were used in this study.A photoreactor including a 30 W monochromatic UV lamp was used for investigation of photodegradations of solid HNS.The changes in surface area of HNS peak in HPLC chromatogram at time intervals of 2,4,6 and 8 h were used for calculation of kinetic rate constants of photodegradation process.The compound of UV-P photostabilizer was found to have the greatest effect on enhancing photostability for HNS among the investigated photostabilizers.The kinetic rate constants were obtained 6.2 × 10-2 and 4.1 × 10-2 h-1,respectively,for photodegradation process of HNS in absence and in presence of UV-P.     

Coordinated scheduling of customer orders for quick response

The scheduling problem addressed in this paper concerns a manufacturer who produces a variety of product types and operates in a make‐to‐order environment. Each customer order consists of known quantities of the different product types, and must be delivered as a single shipment. Periodically the manufacturer schedules the accumulated and unscheduled customer orders. Instances of this problem occur across industries in manufacturing as well as in service environments. In this paper we show that the problem of minimizing the weighted sum of customer order delivery times is unary NP‐hard. We characterize the optimal schedule, solve several special cases of the problem, derive tight lower bounds, and propose several heuristic solutions. We report the results of a set of computational experiments to evaluate the lower bounding procedures and the heuristics, and to determine optimal solutions. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

Optimal control policies for an inventory system with commitment lead time

We consider a firm which faces a Poisson customer demand and uses a base‐stock policy to replenish its inventories from an outside supplier with a fixed lead time. The firm can use a preorder strategy which allows the customers to place their orders before their actual need. The time from a customer's order until the date a product is actually needed is called commitment lead time. The firm pays a commitment cost which is strictly increasing and convex in the length of the commitment lead time. For such a system, we prove the optimality of bang‐bang and all‐or‐nothing policies for the commitment lead time and the base‐stock policy, respectively. We study the case where the commitment cost is linear in the length of the commitment lead time in detail. We show that there exists a unit commitment cost threshold which dictates the optimality of either a buy‐to‐order (BTO) or a buy‐to‐stock strategy. The unit commitment cost threshold is increasing in the unit holding and backordering costs and decreasing in the mean lead time demand. We determine the conditions on the unit commitment cost for profitability of the BTO strategy and study the case with a compound Poisson customer demand.