Performance of heuristics for the uncapacitated lot-size problem

Although the uncapacitated lot-size problem can be solved optimally very efficiently, heuristics are often used instead in practice. Recent research on the performance of these heuristics has focused on worst-case analysis and empirical testing. This article extends earlier worst-case results, for several of the commonly used heuristics, to more specific problem classes to obtain a better understanding of when a heuristic can be expected to perform well and when it is likely to perform poorly. In particular, we obtain bounds for the finite-horizon problem (earlier results all assume an infinite horizon) and for problems in which demand is (i) constant, and (ii) bounded from above or below. We also show how the heuristics can be classified into three categories, with heuristics in each category using similar rules to construct feasible production schedules. Using this categorization, our analysis reveals that a small change in the definition of a heuristic can often have a significant impact on its performance. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

一种基于QFD与ANP的装备作战需求分析方法

针对当前在装备论证过程中缺乏合适的方法和工具将模糊的军事需求科学合理地映射到定量的作战使用性能上去的问题,提出一种基于质量功能部署(QFD)与网络分析法(ANP)的装备作战需求分析方法.该方法能够辅助论证人员深刻理解和合理判断论证中各种因素之间的相互影响关系,通过结构化的装备作战需求分析过程得到能正确反映军事需求的作战使用性能重要度排序.通过实例验证了方法的有效性和实用性.     

The Problem of Weak Nuclear States

Governments are increasingly recognizing the problem posed by internally weak nuclear-capable states. The problem, however, is under-theorized. This article brings together literature on sovereignty and international order, the nonproliferation regime, and weak states, and introduces new concepts to provide a more structured understanding of this problem. Insight comes from focusing attention on the function and governance of two nuclear estates (termed the production and operational estates), and on their resilience to decay and disorder occurring within the state and society. Drawing on empirical observation, the authors suggest a typology of weakness in nuclear states, involving state fragmentation typified by the former Soviet Union, the “hard weak state” typified by North Korea, and the internally conflicted state typified by Pakistan. Although these types give rise to distinctive difficulties, their alleviation depends heavily on the maintenance of internal authority within the state and estates, the presence or absence of cooperative relations, and the international regulatory framework's vitality.     

Multiperiod capacity expansion and shipment planning with linear costs

In this paper we consider a multiperiod deterministic capacity expansion and shipment planning problem for a single product. The product can be manufactured in several producing regions and is required in a number of markets. The demands for each of the markets are non-decreasing over time and must be met exactly during each time period (i.e., no backlogging or inventorying for future periods is permitted). Each region is assumed to have an initial production capacity, which may be increased at a given cost in any period. The demand in a market can be satisfied by production and shipment from any of the regions. The problem is to find a schedule of capacity expansions for the regions and a schedule of shipments from the regions to the markets so as to minimize the discounted capacity expansion and shipment costs. The problem is formulated as a linear programming model, and solved by an efficient algorithm using the operator theory of parametric programming for the transporation problem. Extensions to the infinite horizon case are also provided.     

The stochastic single resource service‐provision problem

The service‐provision problem described in this paper comes from an application of distributed processing in telecommunications networks. The objective is to maximize a service provider's profit from offering computational‐based services to customers. The service provider has limited capacity and must choose which of a set of software applications he would like to offer. This can be done dynamically, taking into consideration that demand for the different services is uncertain. The problem is examined in the framework of stochastic integer programming. Approximations and complexity are examined for the case when demand is described by a discrete probability distribution. For the deterministic counterpart, a fully polynomial approximation scheme is known 2 . We show that introduction of stochasticity makes the problem strongly NP‐hard, implying that the existence of such a scheme for the stochastic problem is highly unlikely. For the general case a heuristic with a worst‐case performance ratio that increases in the number of scenarios is presented. Restricting the class of problem instances in a way that many reasonable practical problem instances satisfy allows for the derivation of a heuristic with a constant worst‐case performance ratio. Worst‐case performance analysis of approximation algorithms is classical in the field of combinatorial optimization, but in stochastic programming the authors are not aware of any previous results in this direction. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003     

Capacity expansion and cost efficiency improvement in the warehouse problem

The warehouse problem with deterministic production cost, selling prices, and demand was introduced in the 1950s and there is a renewed interest recently due to its applications in energy storage and arbitrage. In this paper, we consider two extensions of the warehouse problem and develop efficient computational algorithms for finding their optimal solutions. First, we consider a model where the firm can invest in capacity expansion projects for the warehouse while simultaneously making production and sales decisions in each period. We show that this problem can be solved with a computational complexity that is linear in the product of the length of the planning horizon and the number of capacity expansion projects. We then consider a problem in which the firm can invest to improve production cost efficiency while simultaneously making production and sales decisions in each period. The resulting optimization problem is non‐convex with integer decision variables. We show that, under some mild conditions on the cost data, the problem can be solved in linear computational time. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 367–373, 2016     

Acceleration of the HAP approach for the multifacility location problem

This article considers the problem of locating multiple new facilities to minimize the cost function consisting of the sum of weighted distances among new facilities and between new and existing facilities. The hyperboloid approximate procedure (HAP) is probably the most widely used approach for solving this problem. In this article, an optimality condition for this problem is derived and a method to accelerate the convergence rate of the HAP for the case of Euclidean distances is presented. From the numerical results presented in this article, it can be concluded that the performance of the new algorithm is superior to the performance of the original HAP.     

漂浮式微型波力发电装置传动系统的速度分析与调节

针对边防驻岛官兵用电难的问题,结合海洋波浪能特点,提出了一种新型漂浮式微型波力发电装置。基于装置结构模型,分析了其结构特征和工作原理;建立了传动系统的运动学模型,分析了其运动特性和速度调节性能;进行算例分析,验证了理论模型的正确性。研究表明：双侧传动轮系输入系统优于单侧传动轮系输入系统;改变飞轮的转动惯量,可以调节速度的波动。分析结果为该装置的后续试验研究提供了理论依据。     

TTT transforms and age replacements with discounted costs

The ordinary age replacement problem consists of finding an optimal age at which a unit, needed in a continuous production process, should be replaced in order to minimize the average long-run cost per unit time. Bergman introduced a graphical procedure based on the total-time-on-test (TTT) concept for the analysis of the age replacement problem. In this article, that idea is generalized to the situation of discounted costs. We also study a more general age replacement problem in which we have a form of imperfect repair.     

Through the Looking Glass: The Soviet Military-Technical Revolution and the American Revolution in Military Affairs

The roots of the information technology Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) can be traced to the mid-1970s, when the West capitalized on scientific-technological developments to neutralize the threat posed by Soviet second echelons. However, the cultivation of the technological seeds of the American RMA preceded the maturation of the conceptual ones. Although it was the US that was laying the technological groundwork for the RMA, Soviet, rather than the American military theorists, were the first to argue that the new range of technological innovations constituted a fundamental discontinuity in the nature of war, which they dubbed the ‘Military-Technical Revolution’ (MTR). About a decade later, this fundamental Soviet approach to the transformations in military affairs was analyzed, adapted and adopted by the US, and designated the RMA. This article deals with the intellectual history of the Soviet MTR and the American RMA.     

East versus West in the defeat of Nazi Germany

One of the most commonly expressed opinions about victory in the Second World War is that the Soviet Union was mostly responsible for beating Nazi Germany. Supposedly the great land war fought between these two powers in the East was the decisive front in Europe. The West's contribution to German defeat, on the other hand, is often seen as somewhat marginal. The Anglo‐American strategic bombing campaign in 1943 paid few dividends and it was not until after the Normandy landings in June 1944 that the West really began to divert a large amount of German resources.

The purpose of this article is to challenge some of these basic notions. Through analysing what Germany produced, where it was sent and how it was destroyed, the West's contribution to defeating Germany moves from an ancillary position to a dominant one. Taking German war production as a whole, from 1943 onwards the West was responsible for tying down and destroying a significantly larger share than the Soviet Union.     

Fire Brigade or Tocsin? NATO's ACE Mobile Force,Flexible Response and the Cold War

During the Cold War, NATO planners created the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force (Land) to implement proto-flexible response strategies. Originally conceived as a means to plug gaps in the NATO Central Region "Shield" forces with portable tactical nuclear weapons, ACE Mobile Force evolved into a signalling device intended to forestall an escalatory situation with Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces on NATO's northern and southern flanks. The story of ACE Mobile Force is a lens from which to view the implementation of Flexible Response, particularly in the mature period of the 1970s and 1980s.     

Scheduling a production–distribution system to optimize the tradeoff between delivery tardiness and distribution cost

We consider a make‐to‐order production–distribution system with one supplier and one or more customers. A set of orders with due dates needs to be processed by the supplier and delivered to the customers upon completion. The supplier can process one order at a time without preemption. Each customer is at a distinct location and only orders from the same customer can be batched together for delivery. Each delivery shipment has a capacity limit and incurs a distribution cost. The problem is to find a joint schedule of order processing at the supplier and order delivery from the supplier to the customers that optimizes an objective function involving the maximum delivery tardiness and the total distribution cost. We first study the solvability of various cases of the problem by either providing an efficient algorithm or proving the intractability of the problem. We then develop a fast heuristic for the general problem. We show that the heuristic is asymptotically optimal as the number of orders goes to infinity. We also evaluate the performance of the heuristic computationally by using lower bounds obtained by a column generation approach. Our results indicate that the heuristic is capable of generating near optimal solutions quickly. Finally, we study the value of production–distribution integration by comparing our integrated approach with two sequential approaches where scheduling decisions for order processing are made first, followed by order delivery decisions, with no or only partial integration of the two decisions. We show that in many cases, the integrated approach performs significantly better than the sequential approaches. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

Expansion planning for waste‐to‐energy systems using waste forecast prediction sets

We consider an expansion planning problem for Waste‐to‐Energy (WtE) systems facing uncertainty in future waste supplies. The WtE expansion plans are regarded as strategic, long term decisions, while the waste distribution and treatment are medium to short term operational decisions which can adapt to the actual waste collected. We propose a prediction set uncertainty model which integrates a set of waste generation forecasts and is constructed based on user‐specified levels of forecasting errors. Next, we use the prediction sets for WtE expansion scenario analysis. More specifically, for a given WtE expansion plan, the guaranteed net present value (NPV) is evaluated by computing an extreme value forecast trajectory of future waste generation from the prediction set that minimizes the maximum NPV of the WtE project. This problem is essentially a multiple stage min‐max dynamic optimization problem. By exploiting the structure of the WtE problem, we show this is equivalent to a simpler min‐max optimization problem, which can be further transformed into a single mixed‐integer linear program. Furthermore, we extend the model to optimize the guaranteed NPV by searching over the set of all feasible expansion scenarios, and show that this can be solved by an exact cutting plane approach. We also propose a heuristic based on a constant proportion distribution rule for the WtE expansion optimization model, which reduces the problem into a moderate size mixed‐integer program. Finally, our computational studies demonstrate that our proposed expansion model solutions are very stable and competitive in performance compared to scenario tree approaches. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 47–70, 2016     

“These aren’t the SLOC’s you’re looking for”: mirror-imaging battles of the Atlantic won’t solve current Atlantic security needs

ABSTRACT

Discussion surrounding the announcement of a new NATO Maritime Command for the North Atlantic seems to have settled on the assumption that there is again a vital “sea-line of communication” (SLOC) between North America and Europe as there was supposed to be during the Cold War. The Soviet Union had a large fleet of nuclear and conventional submarines and it seemed very clear that Soviet admirals intended to fight a third “Battle of the Atlantic” in the event of war to prevent Western resupply of NATO. However, this scenario bore no resemblance to what the Soviet Navy actually intended to do in case of war. Changes in technology, notably in submarine propulsion, antisubmarine warfare (ASW), and ballistic missile range and accuracy were the real drivers of the Cold War in the Atlantic. Cruise missile-armed submarines that can attack shore-based economic infrastructure are the real threat from the Russian submarine force.     

Coordinated overhaul scheduling of production units

This article presents a new approach to solve the problem of coordinating the overhaul scheduling of several nonidentical production units. For each production unit, we assume that the operating cost is an n-order polynomial function of the time elapsed since its previous overhaul. We develop an efficient iterative algorithm that generates a near-optimal cyclic overhaul schedule. We also construct a simple algorithm for the case where the overhaul interval for each production unit and the cycle time are restricted to be power-of-two multiples of some base planning period. Finally, we provide a worst-case performance bound for the solution to the problem under the power-of-two restriction. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

纳米级变频器及加法器的新概率建模方法

纳米级数字电路应用时,必须考虑设备故障对纳米级设计的影响.在马尔可夫新特性随机场基础上,提出了纳米级变频器和加法器的概率逻辑模型,并用它们来建模概率行为.实验分析显示设备故障的概率分布极大依赖于系统结构及其他运行参数.     

滤波器阶数对导航接收机时域抗干扰的影响分析

滤波器阶数是影响卫星导航接收机时域自适应抗干扰性能和计算复杂度的核心参数。为了解决当前阶数选取严重依赖工程经验而影响分析不足的问题,分析了滤波器阶数对导航接收机时域自适应抗干扰性能的影响,可为导航接收机低复杂度时域抗干扰的研究提供理论支撑。该分析面向不同干扰环境,分别以滤波器幅频响应和信号载噪比为评估指标,并通过仿真实验和实测对传统最小均方算法和改进型最小均方算法进行验证,提出了一种基于数字滤波器设计的自适应最优滤波器阶数的设计方法。实验数据分析表明,通过适当提升滤波器长度,可以有效提升时域自适应滤波器的抗干扰性能;在实际应用中,可根据实际抗干扰需求,对滤波器阶数进行优化设计。     

优化多星协同观测的改进广义模式搜索算法

多星协同观测可以最大化卫星的整体效能,如何对多星进行部署是一个设计空间大、设计变量多的优化问题.对此,提出了基于Kriging模型的改进广义模式搜索算法.在算法的搜索步,通过代理模型最优和最大期望提高在当前网格内进行选点,避免选择的盲目性;在筛选步,利用代理模型预测筛选集中各点提高的比例并排序,减少不必要的仿真分析.最后,采用该算法对多星部署方案进行优化,通过对比发现,算法性能优于STK-Analyzer,证明了算法的可行性和有效性.