War,vagueness and hybrid war

It has frequently been observed in the literature on hybrid wars that there is a grey zone between peace and war, and that hybrid wars are conflicts which are not clear cases of war. In this paper, I attempt to illuminate this grey zone and the concept and nature of war from the philosophical discussions of vagueness and institutional facts. Vague terms are characterized by the fact that there is no non-arbitrary boundary between entities which lie in their extension, and entities which do not lie in their extension. I apply a theory of vagueness to notions such as “war” and “peace” and go on to suggest that the exact boundary for what counts as a war or not is arbitrary. However, the context in which the conflict occurs determines a range of possible locations for this boundary. The most important contextual parameter is in this respect how the parties to the conflict themselves conceptualize the conflict. I suggest that this can in various ways help us understand grey-zone conflicts.     

A note on efficient sequences with respect to total flow time and number of tardy jobs

For the single‐machine scheduling problem with the objective of simultaneously minimizing total flow time and number of tardy jobs, a lower bound on the number of efficient sequences is known. However, the proof thereof, which makes use of a modified version of Smith's algorithm, is unduly lengthy and sophisticated. Adopting a totally new point of view, we present in this short article a much simpler proof based on the naive idea of pairwise interchange. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 346–348, 2016     

Linear compound algorithms for the partitioning problem

For a given set S of nonnegative integers the partitioning problem asks for a partition of S into two disjoint subsets S₁ and S₂ such that the sum of elements in S₁ is equal to the sum of elements in S₂. If additionally two elements (the kernels) r₁, r₂ ∈ S are given which must not be assigned to the same set S_i, we get the partitioning problem with kernels. For these NP‐complete problems the authors present two compound algorithms which consist both of three linear greedylike algorithms running independently. It is shown that the worst‐case performance of the heuristic for the ordinary partitioning problem is 12/11, while the second procedure for partitioning with kernels has a bound of 8/7. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 593–601, 2000