Countering Insurgent-terrorism: Why Nato Chose The Wrong Historical Foundation For Cimic

History teaches that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns have never been won through purely military action. Defeating an opponent who avoids open battle, but who uses force to reach his goals, including terrorist action, requires a combination of police, administrative, economic and military measures. As a counterinsurgency campaign should pursue a comprehensive political objective, it requires high levels of civil–military cooperation. However, current NATO doctrine for Civil–Military Cooperation (CIMIC) as it emerged from the 1990s is founded in conventional war-fighting and outdated peacekeeping doctrine. CIMIC's focus is on supporting military objectives rather than enabling the military to make a coherent contribution to political objectives. This makes CIMIC unfit for the Alliance's main operational challenges that have expanded from peace operations on the Balkans to countering insurgent terrorism in Afghanistan. When developing CIMIC, the Alliance obviously neglected the historical lessons from counterinsurgency campaigns.     

A generalized assignment model for dynamic supply chain capacity planning

We consider a generalization of the well‐known generalized assignment problem (GAP) over discrete time periods encompassed within a finite planning horizon. The resulting model, MultiGAP, addresses the assignment of tasks to agents within each time period, with the attendant single‐period assignment costs and agent‐capacity constraint requirements, in conjunction with transition costs arising between any two consecutive periods in which a task is reassigned to a different agent. As is the case for its single‐period antecedent, MultiGAP offers a robust tool for modeling a wide range of capacity planning problems occurring within supply chain management. We provide two formulations for MultiGAP and establish that the second (alternative) formulation provides a tighter bound. We define a Lagrangian relaxation‐based heuristic as well as a branch‐and‐bound algorithm for MultiGAP. Computational experience with the heuristic and branch‐and‐bound algorithm on over 2500 test problems is reported. The Lagrangian heuristic consistently generates high‐quality and in many cases near‐optimal solutions. The branch‐and‐bound algorithm is also seen to constitute an effective means for solving to optimality MultiGAP problems of reasonable size. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

Modeling the operation of multireservoir systems using decomposition and stochastic dynamic programming

Stochastic dynamic programming models are attractive for multireservoir control problems because they allow non‐linear features to be incorporated and changes in hydrological conditions to be modeled as Markov processes. However, with the exception of the simplest cases, these models are computationally intractable because of the high dimension of the state and action spaces involved. This paper proposes a new method of determining an operating policy for a multireservoir control problem that uses stochastic dynamic programming, but is practical for systems with many reservoirs. Decomposition is first used to reduce the problem to a number of independent subproblems. Each subproblem is formulated as a low‐dimensional stochastic dynamic program and solved to determine the operating policy for one of the reservoirs in the system. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006     

Analysis of a new vehicle scheduling and location problem

We consider a container terminal discharging containers from a ship and locating them in the terminal yard. Each container has a number of potential locations in the yard where it can be stored. Containers are moved from the ship to the yard using a fleet of vehicles, each of which can carry one container at a time. The problem is to assign each container to a yard location and dispatch vehicles to the containers so as to minimize the time it takes to download all the containers from the ship. We show that the problem is NP‐hard and develop a heuristic algorithm based on formulating the problem as an assignment problem. The effectiveness of the heuristic is analyzed from both worst‐case and computational points of view. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 363–385, 2001     

On the solution of a stochastic bottleneck assignment problem and its variations

In this article, we study the stochastic version of the so-called bottleneck assignment problem. Our primary objective is to maximize the probability that the bottleneck value satisfies a specified target. Under general stochastic assumptions, we show that the solution in this case is easily obtained by solving a linear assignment problem. We next examine the situation where the target is to be minimized, given that the probability of satisfying the target exceeds a specified threshold. Finally, we address extensions to the original problem where a second objective is also considered.     

The shortest queue model with jockeying

In this article we deal with the shortest queue model with jockeying. We assume that the arrivals are Poisson, each of the exponential servers has his own queue, and jockeying among the queues is permitted. Explicit solutions of the equilibrium probabilities, the expected customers, and the expected waiting time of a customer in the system are given, which only depend on the traffic intensity. Numerical results can be easily obtained from our solutions. Several examples are provided in the article.     

A branch‐and‐cut algorithm for the nonpreemptive swapping problem

In the Swapping Problem (SP), we are given a complete graph, a set of object types, and a vehicle of unit capacity. An initial state specifies the object type currently located at each vertex (at most one type per vertex). A final state describes where these object types must be repositioned. In general, there exist several identical objects for a given object type, yielding multiple possible destinations for each object. The SP consists of finding a shortest vehicle route starting and ending at an arbitrary vertex, in such a way that each object is repositioned in its final state. This article exhibits some structural properties of optimal solutions and proposes a branch‐and‐cut algorithm based on a 0‐1 formulation of the problem. Computational results on random instances containing up to 200 vertices and eight object types are reported. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

An error components model of cost overruns and schedule slip on army R&D programs

What has been causing cost overruns and schedule slippages in Army major weapon-system R&D programs during the past ten years? This article addresses this question with emphasis on the effectiveness of an Army acquisition strategy entitled Total Risk Assessing Cost Estimating (TRACE). An empirical study employed a questionnaire and interviews with key personnel from all of the major Army Program Management Offices involved with R&D. The major research question was the following: What explanatory variables have been affecting R&D cost overruns and development time? This includes an evaluation of TRACE as a potential explanatory variable. Data was collected and analyzed using an error components multiple regression model. The major explanatory variables that appeared to explain cost overruns were technological risk of the program, education and experience of key program management office personnel, and the degree of “buy in” by the prime contractor. Strong statistical results indicate that TRACE is having little or no effect on cost overruns. In the case of development time, the major explanatory variables were seen to be technological risk of the program, testing, TRACE, education, and length of the R&D contract.     

A simulation study of the efficiency of empirical Bayes' estimators of multiple correlated probability vectors

Empirical Bayes' methods had been used by Brier, Zacks, and Marlow [1] for estimating performance characteristic vectors of success probabilities. The problem is that of estimating k-dimensional success probabilities of dependent binomial random variables, which are highly correlated. The present study reinforces the results of the previous one by showing, via simulations, that the relative efficiency of the empirical Bayes estimators, compared to the Stein-type and to the maximum-likelihood ones, is very high. This holds even if the success proportions are based on a small number of trials. We study the case of equicorrelation structure with positive correlations.