DOES MILITARY EXPENDITURE MATTER FOR INFLATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH?

This paper sets up a monetary endogenous growth model, and uses it to explain the ambiguous linkage between the military burden and the inflation rate observed in existing empirical studies. It is found that an expansion in the military burden has an ambiguous effect on the inflation rate depending upon the relative extent of two conflicting forces. More specifically, if the increase in the marginal benefit from holding money exceeds (falls short of) the increase in the marginal product of private capital, the inflation rate will rise (fall) in response. Moreover, it is found that an increase in the military burden will stimulate the balanced growth rate, confirming Benoit’s famous empirical findings.     

Demand forecasting by temporal aggregation

Demand forecasting performance is subject to the uncertainty underlying the time series an organization is dealing with. There are many approaches that may be used to reduce uncertainty and thus to improve forecasting performance. One intuitively appealing such approach is to aggregate demand in lower‐frequency “time buckets.” The approach under concern is termed to as temporal aggregation, and in this article, we investigate its impact on forecasting performance. We assume that the nonaggregated demand follows either a moving average process of order one or a first‐order autoregressive process and a single exponential smoothing (SES) procedure is used to forecast demand. These demand processes are often encountered in practice and SES is one of the standard estimators used in industry. Theoretical mean‐squared error expressions are derived for the aggregated and nonaggregated demand to contrast the relevant forecasting performances. The theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive numerical investigation and experimentation with an empirical dataset. The results indicate that performance improvements achieved through the aggregation approach are a function of the aggregation level, the smoothing constant, and the process parameters. Valuable insights are offered to practitioners and the article closes with an agenda for further research in this area. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 479–498, 2013     

TIME-VARYING CHARACTERISTICS OF SOUTH KOREA-UNITED STATES AND JAPAN-UNITED STATES MILITARY ALLIANCES UNDER CHINESE THREAT: A PUBLIC GOOD APPROACH

This paper investigates the nature of two military alliances under Chinese threat. The findings are as follows: First, South Korea does not consider China a significant threat while Japan and the United States have recognized China as a serious threat since the 1990s and the 2000s, respectively. Second, the relationship between South Korea and the United States is a true military alliance for all time periods, but the nature of the alliance has changed since the 1970s. Third, although Japan began to form an alliance relationship with the United States in the 1990s, Japan is considered a more significant ally by the United States. This paper implies that, should China provoke a military confrontation, it might be difficult to deduce a common solution among the three countries because of the different response to military threats from China.     

Approximation results for min‐max path cover problems in vehicle routing

This article studies a min‐max path cover problem, which is to determine a set of paths for k capacitated vehicles to service all the customers in a given weighted graph so that the largest path cost is minimized. The problem has wide applications in vehicle routing, especially when the minimization of the latest service completion time is a critical performance measure. We have analyzed four typical variants of this problem, where the vehicles have either unlimited or limited capacities, and they start from either a given depot or any depot of a given depot set. We have developed approximation algorithms for these four variants, which achieve approximation ratios of max{3 ‐ 2/k,2}, 5, max{5 ‐ 2/k,4}, and 7, respectively. We have also analyzed the approximation hardness of these variants by showing that, unless P = NP , it is impossible for them to achieve approximation ratios less than 4/3, 3/2, 3/2, and 2, respectively. We have further extended the techniques and results developed for this problem to other min‐max vehicle routing problems.© 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

Constrained minimax optimization of continuous search efforts for the detection of a stationary target

Analytical resolution of search theory problems, as formalized by B.O. Koopman, may be applied with some model extension to various resource management issues. However, a fundamental prerequisite is the knowledge of the prior target density. Though this assumption has the definite advantage of simplicity, its drawback is clearly that target reactivity is not taken into account. As a preliminary step towards reactive target study stands the problem of resource planning under a min–max game context. This paper is related to Nakai's work about the game planning of resources for the detection of a stationary target. However, this initial problem is extended by adding new and more general constraints, allowing a more realistic modeling of the target and searcher behaviors. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Computational analysis of MMAP[K]/PH[K]/1 queues with a mixed FCFS and LCFS service discipline

This paper studies a queueing system with a Markov arrival process with marked arrivals and PH‐distribution service times for each type of customer. Customers (regardless of their types) are served on a mixed first‐come‐first‐served (FCFS) and last‐come‐first‐served (LCFS) nonpreemptive basis. That is, when the queue length is N (a positive integer) or less, customers are served on an FCFS basis; otherwise, customers are served on an LCFS basis. The focus is on the stationary distribution of queue strings, busy periods, and waiting times of individual types of customers. A computational approach is developed for computing the stationary distribution of queue strings, the mean of busy period, and the means and variances of waiting times. The relationship between these performance measures and the threshold number N is analyzed in depth numerically. It is found that the variance of the virtual (actual) waiting time of an arbitrary customer can be reduced by increasing N. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 399–421, 2000     

Deterministic inventory lot‐size models under inflation with shortages and deterioration for fluctuating demand

In this paper, we extend the inventory lot‐size models to allow for inflation and fluctuating demand (which is more general than constant, increasing, decreasing, and log‐concave demand patterns). We prove that the optimal replenishment schedule not only exists but is also unique. Furthermore, we show that the total cost associated with the inventory system is a convex function of the number of replenishments. Hence, the search for the optimal number of replenishments is simplified to finding a local minimum. Finally, several numerical examples are provided to illustrate the results. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 144–158, 2001     

New inequalities for finite and infinite group problems from approximate lifting

In this paper, we derive new families of facet‐defining inequalities for the finite group problem and extreme inequalities for the infinite group problem using approximate lifting. The new valid inequalities for the finite group problem include two‐ and three‐slope facet‐defining inequalities as well as the first family of four‐slope facet‐defining inequalities. The new valid inequalities for the infinite group problem include families of two‐ and three‐slope extreme inequalities. These new inequalities not only illustrate the diversity of strong inequalities for the finite and infinite group problems, but also provide a large variety of new cutting planes for solving integer and mixed‐integer programming problems. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Estimating failure time distribution and its parameters based on intermediate data from a Wiener degradation model

Instead of measuring a Wiener degradation or performance process at predetermined time points to track degradation or performance of a product for estimating its lifetime, we propose to obtain the first‐passage times of the process over certain nonfailure thresholds. Based on only these intermediate data, we obtain the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator and uniformly most accurate confidence interval for the mean lifetime. For estimating the lifetime distribution function, we propose a modified maximum likelihood estimator and a new estimator and prove that, by increasing the sample size of the intermediate data, these estimators and the above‐mentioned estimator of the mean lifetime can achieve the same levels of accuracy as the estimators assuming one has failure times. Thus, our method of using only intermediate data is useful for highly reliable products when their failure times are difficult to obtain. Furthermore, we show that the proposed new estimator of the lifetime distribution function is more accurate than the standard and modified maximum likelihood estimators. We also obtain approximate confidence intervals for the lifetime distribution function and its percentiles. Finally, we use light‐emitting diodes as an example to illustrate our method and demonstrate how to validate the Wiener assumption during the testing. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008