Book reviews

Over the last 18 years or so, much of the debate about modern warfare has been about whether it should be described as ‘old’ or ‘new’. However, there has not been a definitive answer as to which best reflects war in the modern world. Increasingly, the alternative arguments are polarised into opposing camps. Indeed, it would be fair to say that there is little in the way of debate at all. By revaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each argument, this paper aims to reinvigorate that discussion by examining whether changes in the way we understand war are really required. Finding that the ideas are not in fact mutually exclusive, it suggests that future research could benefit from a combined approach.     

Non-lethal weapons and the long tail of warfare

This paper examines whether non-lethal weapons (NLWs) enhance the capability of the US armed forces to conduct irregular warfare (IW) operations. With expectations that the operational environment will only continue to become more complex in the future, NLWs may reduce the level of violence received, as well as dispensed, by US forces while performing tasks in the IW spectrum. We argue that NLWs increase the ability of US forces to address the long tail of warfare and their deployment should be increased in the near term.     

Proactive release procedures for just‐in‐time job shop environments,subject to machine failures

In this paper, we consider just‐in‐time job shop environments (job shop problems with an objective of minimizing the sum of tardiness and inventory costs), subject to uncertainty due to machine failures. We present techniques for proactive uncertainty management that exploit prior knowledge of uncertainty to build competitive release dates, whose execution improves performance. These techniques determine the release dates of different jobs based on measures of shop load, statistical data of machine failures, and repairs with a tradeoff between inventory and tardiness costs. Empirical results show that our methodology is very promising in comparison with simulated annealing and the best of 39 combinations of dispatch rules & release policies, under different frequencies of breakdowns. We observe that the performance of the proactive technique compared to the other two approaches improves in schedule quality (maximizing delivery performance while minimizing costs) with increase in frequency of breakdowns. The proactive technique presented here is also computationally less expensive than the other two approaches. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004     

Bayes假设检验及样本数量问题研究

针对Bayes方法在工程实践中未能得到广泛应用的实际情况分析了Bayes方法存在的问题,以正态总体期望为背景研究并改进了Bayes方法,进一步推导了Bayes假设检验样本数量确定方法。     

磨合预处理对有机钼添加剂摩擦学性能的影响

采用MMW-1万能摩擦磨损试验机,考察了磨合预处理工况(时间、载荷)对两种有机钼添加剂在CF-4 15W-40柴油机油中抗磨减摩性能的影响。采用扫描电子显微镜和能谱仪分析了磨斑表面形貌和表面元素组成。结果表明,适当的磨合预处理可有效增强有机钼添加剂在柴油机油中的抗磨减摩性能,且经过磨合预处理的磨斑表面形貌较没有处理时平整,添加剂主要功能元素在摩擦表面的质量分数增加。     

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