A continuous‐time strategic capacity planning model

Capacity planning decisions affect a significant portion of future revenue. In the semiconductor industry, they need to be made in the presence of both highly volatile demand and long capacity installation lead‐times. In contrast to traditional discrete‐time models, we present a continuous‐time stochastic programming model for multiple resource types and product families. We show how this approach can solve capacity planning problems of reasonable size and complexity with provable efficiency. This is achieved by an application of the divide‐and‐conquer algorithm, convexity, submodularity, and the open‐pit mining problem. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

THE PROHIBITION OF BLINDING AS A METHOD OF WARFARE

Abstract

From the 1982 Maitatsine Uprising to the 2009 Kala Kato Riot, Nigeria has been bedevilled by ethno-religious uprisings with devastating human and material losses. In almost all these crises the police and the military have featured prominently as agencies tasked with the responsibility of maintaining law and order and suppressing insurrection. While it was not alleged that they precipitated some of these risings perhaps in their attempts to stem or nip them in the bud, they have been accused of escalating the conflict either by their slow and inadequate responses, their partisanship and their arbitrary responses, or by their slackness in managing the crises and their aftermath. However, but for their efforts the security basis of the Nigerian state would have been considerably compromised by religious fundamentalism given the level of preparedness of the groups involved, their resistance and, more importantly, the recurrent nature of the uprisings. This article reflects on the management of ethno-religious uprisings in Nigeria by the police and the military. It considers the nature of the security agencies' involvement in the crises and examines the factors both within the agencies and in the larger Nigerian society which have aided or hindered their effective management of the conflicts.     

‘What Kind of War is This?’

This article explores the nature of the American war in Vietnam in an effort to determine whether it was a response to an indigenous uprising or an external effort by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) to use a wide array of policies and programs to unite North Vietnam and South Vietnam under the party’s leadership. It argues that, although there initially were elements of the South Vietnamese population that rose against the southern leadership, the CPV gained control of their resistance and relegated it to a secondary role in the CPV war effort.     

An assumption-free convergence analysis for a perturbation of the scaling algorithm for linear programs,with application to the L1 estimation problem

This article is concerned with the scaling variant of Karmarkar's algorithm for linear programming problems. Several researchers have presented convergence analyses for this algorithm under various nondegeneracy types of assumptions, or under assumptions regarding the nature of the sequence of iterates generated by the algorithm. By employing a slight perturbation of the algorithm, which is computationally imperceptible, we are able to prove without using any special assumptions that the algorithm converges finitely to an ε-optimal solution for any chosen ε > 0, from which it can be (polynomically) rounded to an optimum, for ε > 0 small enough. The logarithmic barrier function is used as a construct for this analysis. A rounding scheme which produces an optimal extreme point solution is also suggested. Besides the non-negatively constrained case, we also present a convergence analysis for the case of bounded variables. An application in statistics to the L₁ estimation problem and related computational results are presented.     

A general model of heterogeneous system lifetimes and conditions for system burn‐in

Burn‐in is a technique to enhance reliability by eliminating weak items from a population of items having heterogeneous lifetimes. System burn‐in can improve system reliability, but the conditions for system burn‐in to be performed after component burn‐in remain a little understood mathematical challenge. To derive such conditions, we first introduce a general model of heterogeneous system lifetimes, in which the component burn‐in information and assembly problems are related to the prediction of system burn‐in. Many existing system burn‐in models become special cases and two important results are identified. First, heterogeneous system lifetimes can be understood naturally as a consequence of heterogeneous component lifetimes and heterogeneous assembly quality. Second, system burn‐in is effective if assembly quality variation in the components and connections which are arranged in series is greater than a threshold, where the threshold depends on the system structure and component failure rates. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 364–380, 2003.     

The Joint Chiefs of Staff,the atom bomb,the American Military Mind and the end of the Second World War

ABSTRACT

The decision by the US government to drop the atomic bombs on Japan is one of the most heavily debated questions in history. This article examines one element of that debate, in many ways the most surprising. That was the different views of the top of the military hierarchy in the USA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The JCS was on the whole more sceptical about using atomic weaponry than the USA’s civilian leadership, for ethical and strategic reasons. As such they were willing to consider very different ways of ending the war.     

Nobody wins the victory taboo in just war theory

ABSTRACT

This article examines how scholars of the just war tradition think about the ethical dilemmas that arise in the endgame phase of modern warfare. In particular, it focuses upon their reticence to engage the idiom of ‘victory’. Why, it asks, have scholars been so reluctant to talk about what it means to ‘win’ a just war? It contends that, while just war scholars may have good reason to be sceptical about ‘victory’, engaging it would grant them a more direct view of the critical potentialities, but also the limitations, of just war reasoning.     

Isoquants of continuous production correspondences

Bol has discussed consequences of the continuity of production correspondences in connection with relations between efficient input and output vectors. Isoquants of continuous production correspondences are used here to extend this work. Simplifications to existing theory are discussed.     

Applications of Mills' Differential

Using Mills Differential a game value function ?, used in the Kemeny-Morgenstern-Thompson growth model to show the existence of solutions, is discussed. In doing so, several proofs become shorter, in addition known results are seen in a new context. Finally connections between the existence of a so-called economic solution and the differentiability or non-differentiability of function ? are analyzed.