‘Stay-Behind’ in France: Much ado about nothing?

Stay-behind networks in France were set up starting in 1948 and were aimed at responding to the possibility of a Soviet armed attack into Western Europe. Participants were identified, and arms and explosives cached, to be activated in case of hostilities. This activity became folded into a multilateral effort under the Allied Coordination Committee (ACC) of NATO. In France, the network was run as a highly compartmented activity under the French external intelligence service (DGSE). As the Soviet threat receded, the stay-behind activity became more and more dormant, and in 1990 it was quietly disbanded, immediately after the P-2 scandal broke in Italy.     

Special Air Service Books to Choose From

Barry Davies, Joining the SAS: How to Get In and What It's Like.Miami: Lewis International Inc., 1998. Pp.214, photos, index. $22.95. ISBN 0–966771–4–2.

Peter McAleese and John Avery, McAleese's Fighting Manual: The Definitive Soldier's Handbook.London: Orion, 1998. Pp.179, illus. £18.95. ISBN 0–75280–063–9.

Steve Crawford et al.The SAS Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the World's Crack Regiment.Miami: Lewis International Inc., 1998. Pp.288, photos, maps, index. $29.95. ISBN 0–9666771–0–2.

Barry Davies et al.The Complete Encyclopedia of the SAS.London: Virgin Publishing Ltd, 1998. Pp.288, photos, maps, no index. $39.95. ISBN 1–85227–707–6.     

Warranty design under buyer and seller risk aversion

This paper provides a framework in which warranty policies for non-repairable items can be evaluated according to risk preferences of both buyers and sellers. In particular, a warranty price schedule is established such that sellers are indifferent among the policies. Given this schedule, a buyer's response is expressed by selecting the price-warranty combination that minimizes disutility. Within this framework, a warranty can be viewed as an instrumet of risk management that can induce more sales and greater profitability. For given utility functions, analytical results for the development of a price schedule are developed. Numerical results illustrate the substitution effects between warranty terms, prices, and risk parameters.     

A mathematical programming approach to identification and optimization of a class of unknown systems

There exists a class of decision problems for which: (1) models of input-output response functions are not available in a closed-form, functional representation; (2) informational costs associated with learning about the response function are significant. For these problems, combining identification with optimization using mathematical programming is potentially attractive. Three approaches to the identification-optimization problem are proposed: an outer-linearized approximation using relaxation (OLR); an inner-linearized approximation using restriction (ILR); and a sequential combination of inner- and outer-linearized subproblems (SIO). Algorithms based on each approach are developed and computational experience reported.     

Optimal spares for stochastically failing equipment

A mathematical model is formulated for determining the number of spare components to purchase when components stochastically fail according to a known life distribution function and there is a cost incurred when a component is replaced. Bounds are determined for the optimal inventory which indicate that the inclusion of the replacement cost lowers the optimal inventory. Since these bounds are no easier to calculate than the optimal spares level, the theory is specialized to components with exponentially distributed time to failure. Procedures are given for calculating the optimal spares level, and numerical examples are provided.     

Book reviews

Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: Threats to European Security. By Stephen Iwan Griffiths. SIPRI Research Report No. 5. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1993), ISBN 0-19-829162-0, £16.50.

Red Storm on the Reich, By C.J. Duffy. Routledge, London (1991) ISBN 0-415-0359-9, £35.00.

Gangsters and Revolutionaries. By R. Cribb. Allen and Unwin, ISBN 0-O4-301296-5 (1992), £12.95.

The Cyanide War. By E. O'Ballance. Brassey's, London (1989). ISBN 0 08 036695 3, Price £18.00.     

An efficient heuristic for the multi-item newsboy problem with a single constraint

This article treats the problem of determining optimal and approximately optimal order quantities for a multiple-item inventory system subject to a single constraint on space or budget. Although this problem can be solved by the usual method of Lagrange multipliers, we wish to consider a more efficient scheme that requires fewer computations. We provide calculations that compare and contrast four approximation techniques. In particular, we have discovered a method that yields a direct algebraic expression of the problem parameters for allocation and achieves an expected profit within 90% of the optimal in about 90% of the cases tested.     

Disaggregation in economic models

This article illustrates numerically that the adjustment path of the economy will not show how a national policymaker may be misled by overaggregation until it is too late for correction. Labor and other resources are overaggregated in the equilibrating mechanism of most economic models, tending to mislead policymakers regarding both the amount and direction of change of important variables. Overaggregation also hides important constraints and tradeoffs which masks opportunities to use slack resources. In turn, this creates unnecessary dilemmas, such as that between inflation and unemployment which plagued the progress of the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill. The article first illustrates the hypothesis using simple models. Then its relevance to current analysis and planning is discussed.     

Efficient multinomial selection in simulation

Consider a simulation experiment consisting of v independent vector replications across k systems, where in any given replication one system is selected as the best performer (i.e., it wins). Each system has an unknown constant probability of winning in any replication and the numbers of wins for the individual systems follow a multinomial distribution. The classical multinomial selection procedure of Bechhofer, Elmaghraby, and Morse (Procedure BEM) prescribes a minimum number of replications, denoted as v*, so that the probability of correctly selecting the true best system (PCS) meets or exceeds a prespecified probability. Assuming that larger is better, Procedure BEM selects as best the system having the largest value of the performance measure in more replications than any other system. We use these same v* replications across k systems to form (v*)^k pseudoreplications that contain one observation from each system, and develop Procedure AVC (All Vector Comparisons) to achieve a higher PCS than with Procedure BEM. For specific small-sample cases and via a large-sample approximation we show that the PCS with Procedure AVC exceeds the PCS with Procedure BEM. We also show that with Procedure AVC we achieve a given PCS with a smaller v than the v* required with Procedure BEM. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 459–482, 1998     

Due-date assignment and early/tardy scheduling on identical parallel machines

This article examines the problem of simultaneously assigning a common due date to a set of independent jobs and scheduling them on identical parallel machines in such a way that the costs associated with the due date and with the earliness or tardiness of the jobs are minimized. We establish that, for certain values of the due-date cost, an optimal schedule for this problem is also optimal for an early/tardy scheduling problem studied by Emmons. We discuss the solution properties for the two problems, and show that both problems are NP-hard even for two machines. We further show that these problems become strongly NP-hard if the number of machines is allowed to be arbitrary. We provide a dynamic programming solution for the problems, the complexity of which indicates that the problems can be solved in pseudopolynomial time as long as the number of machines remains fixed. Finally, we present the results of a limited computational study. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.