Tipping the scales: short-term interventions and counterinsurgency

Particularly in African operations, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping forces have faced significant problems in restoring stability. In at least a few situations, unilateral national military interventions have been launched in the same countries. In the cases of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, the British and French interventions respectively played a significant role in re-establishing stability. Lessons from these operations suggest that if effective coordination and liaison channels are established, such hybrid unilateral-UN missions can in fact be more successful than “pure” peace operations.     

A proof for the longest-job-first policy in one-machine scheduling

We consider a one-machine scheduling problem with earliness and tardiness penalties. All jobs are assigned a common due date and the objective is to minimize the total penalty due to job earliness and tardiness. We are interested in finding the optimal combination of the common due-date value and the job sequence. Despite the fact that this problem in general is very hard to solve, we prove that there exists at least a common property for all optimal solutions: The first job in an optimal sequence is one of the longest jobs. We also prove that this property holds for a general class of unimodal penalty functions.     

Discount pricing policies for inventories subject to declining demand

Until only recently, the mechanism behind determining item price has been ignored and the discount price taken as a given in quantity-discount inventory decision problems. Inventory subject to declining demand further complicates both pricing and replenishment decisions. This article provides the vendor with the means for optimally determining both the discount price and replenishment order frequency for all buyers in the system in an environment of declining demand. In the multiple-buyer case, we provide an efficient algorithm for classifying buyers into homogeneous subgroups to further enhance joint cost savings among all system participants.     

Scheduling with centralized and decentralized batching policies in concurrent open shops

This article considers batch scheduling with centralized and decentralized decisions. The context of our study is concurrent open shop scheduling where the jobs are to be processed on a set of independent dedicated machines, which process designated operations of the jobs in batches. The batching policy across the machines can be centralized or decentralized. We study such scheduling problems with the objectives of minimizing the maximum lateness, weighted number of tardy jobs, and total weighted completion time, when the job sequence is determined in advance. We present polynomial time dynamic programming algorithms for some cases of these problems and pseudo‐polynomial time algorithms for some problems that are NP‐hard in the ordinary sense. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 58: 17–27, 2011     

India's Aspirations and Strategy for the Indian Ocean – Securing the Waves?

India has increasingly high aspirations in the Indian Ocean, as enunciated by politicians, naval figures and the wider elite. These aspirations, its strategic discourse, are of pre-eminence and leadership. India's maritime strategy for such a self-confessed diplomatic, constabulary and benign role is primarily naval-focused; a sixfold strategy of increasing its naval spending, strengthening its infrastructure, increasing its naval capabilities, active maritime diplomacy, exercising in the Indian Ocean and keeping open the choke points. Through such strategy, and soft balancing with the United States, India hopes to secure its own position against a perceived growing Chinese challenge in the Indian Ocean.     

A decision support system for the procurement of military equipment

The use of life-cycle costs in procurement is limited by the accuracy of cost estimates and assessments of availability risks under the conditions generating costs. Critical to these problems are the needs and responses of equipment to maintenance and repair. Using transition probabilities to define the relationships between serviceability and maintenance and repairs, this article develops a comprehensive decision support system for military procurement. It uses a dynamic programming model to determine the least-cost set of maintenance and repair decisions, where adjustments are included for warranty conditions, time value of money, the opportunity costs of equipment failure, and the end-of-cycle salvage values or disposal costs. The system allows users to define working and failed states, create their own rules or indicators of availability from estimates of state probabilities and establish thresholds of risk acceptability.