Commitment decisions with partial information updating

In this paper, we extend the results of Ferguson M. Naval Research Logistics 8 . on an end‐product manufacturer's choice of when to commit to an order quantity from its parts supplier. During the supplier's lead‐time, information arrives about end‐product demand. This information reduces some of the forecast uncertainty. While the supplier must choose its production quantity of parts based on the original forecast, the manufacturer can wait to place its order from the supplier after observing the information update. We find that a manufacturer is sometimes better off with a contract requiring an early commitment to its order quantity, before the supplier commits resources. On the other hand, the supplier sometimes prefers a delayed commitment. The preferences depend upon the amount of demand uncertainty resolved by the information as well as which member of the supply chain sets the exchange price. We also show conditions where demand information updating is detrimental to both the manufacturer and the supplier. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

Rhetoric versus reality: Canadian defence planning in a time of austerity

As Canada's military mission in Afghanistan winds down and the country faces several years of fiscal austerity, all of Canada's major political parties are agreed that Canadian defence budgets must stay level or be cut. This comes at a time when the defence department is slated to replace the Canadian Forces’ (CF) major equipment fleets. Canada's defence establishment thus faces some critical decisions. One option is to try to maintain its expeditionary capabilities across all three services: army, navy and air force. Absent substantial new infusions of funds, however, this approach is likely to lead to an overall and largely chaotic reduction of capabilities. Another option is to make some difficult choices as to which expeditionary capabilities to maintain as part of a strategic review of Canada's future military needs. Such an option would ensure that Canada has at least some military capacities which can reliably be devoted to the most demanding international operations, while maintaining those capabilities required for domestic duties and North American defence. Pursuing this option would accord with the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization Strategic Concept and the call for “Smart Defense” within the Alliance. This article assesses the arguments for and against the option of specialising Canada's future defence capabilities and explores scenarios as to what a future CF may look like.     

Think again – supplying war: reappraising military logistics and its centrality to strategy and war

This article argues that logistics constrains strategic opportunity while itself being heavily circumscribed by strategic and operational planning. With the academic literature all but ignoring the centrality of logistics to strategy and war, this article argues for a reappraisal of the critical role of military logistics, and posits that the study and conduct of war and strategy are incomplete at best or false at worst when they ignore this crucial component of the art of war. The article conceptualises the logistics–strategy nexus in a novel way, explores its contemporary manifestation in an age of uncertainty, and applies it to a detailed case study of UK operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.     

Mirror,mirror on the wall,who is the most offensive of them all? – Explaining the offensive bias in military tactical thinking

This article explores why the offensive predominates military tactical thinking. With survey results showing an offensive bias among 60 per cent of senior Swedish officers and as many as 80 per cent in the case of the army, it is clear that this is not just a problem of the past but is equally relevant today. The article asks why there is a tendency to perceive and understand offensive tactics as the preferred choice and the way to conduct battle that should be encouraged and preferred. Drawing on existing research and the findings of a pilot study, ten propositions for why the offensive bias exists are tested using a mixed-method approach. Based on the findings, the article develops a model to understand why the offensive dominates military tactical thinking. It is found that the two key constitutive factors behind the offensive bias are military culture and education. These factors most directly and profoundly influence an officer’s identity, perceptions, and thinking. Military culture and education, in turn, work as a prism for four other factors: military history, the theory and principles of war, doctrine and TTPs, and psychological factors.     

Cost analysis and extension of a simple maintenance-scheduling heuristic

Practitioners of maintenance scheduling sometimes use a simple analytic formula, derived based on inspection scheduling, as a heuristic to determine the length of the preventive maintenance period. The sensitivity of this heuristic solution is analyzed and the cost penalties are calculated compared to the exact solution that utilizes the lifetime distribution in the derivation of the optimal preventive maintenance period. A simple extension of the heuristic is suggested to improve the approximation with a slightly increased computational effort. The sensitivity and cost analysis of the improved heuristic are discussed as well. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Naval policy and national strategy in France, 1933–1937

This article argues that French naval policy‐makers were slow to adjust to the changed strategic landscape of the 1930s. During the 1920s France did not face a serious land or air threat. Defence policy‐makers were therefore able to devote a large portion of the defence budget to rebuilding French maritime power. But when the Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany overturned the strategic situation in Europe, policy‐makers adjusted by giving priority to land and air rearmament and by placing ever greater emphasis on securing an alliance with Great Britain. The French naval establishment resisted this trend unsuccessfully. The frustration of naval planning increased the resentment and mistrust of both the Third Republic and Great Britain that characterised naval attitudes before and particularly during the Second World War.     

Utility assessment procedures for polynomial-exponential functions

This article develops a methodology for testing constant exchange risk properties and identifying an appropriate form for a decision maker's utility function. These risk properties characterize six different utility functions which are sums of products of polynomials and exponential functions. Such functional forms are commonly used in decision analysis applications. The practical advantage of this methodology is that these constant exchange risk properties eliminate the usual arbitrariness in the selection of a parametric utility function and often reduce the data requirements for subsequent estimation. The procedure is straightforward to apply. The decision maker need only provide certainty equivalents for two-outcome gambles and determine the more-preferred gamble in paired comparisons. The technical details of the procedure can be handled by interactive computer software.     

An approach for solving discrete alternative multiple criteria problems involving ordinal criteria

The existence of ordinal criteria is a factor that complicates multiple criteria problems. In this article we develop an approach for the problem of choosing among discrete alternatives assuming that criteria are ordinal. The approach requires pairwise comparisons of alternatives by the decision maker. Based on these comparisons, presumably inferior alternatives are eliminated. Experience on randomly generated problems indicates that the approach usually chooses one of the most preferred alternatives and requires a small number of pairwise comparisons.     

Capacitated warehouse location model with risk pooling

In this article, we introduce the capacitated warehouse location model with risk pooling (CLMRP), which captures the interdependence between capacity issues and the inventory management at the warehouses. The CLMRP models a logistics system in which a single plant ships one type of product to a set of retailers, each with an uncertain demand. Warehouses serve as the direct intermediary between the plant and the retailers for the shipment of the product and also retain safety stock to provide appropriate service levels to the retailers. The CLMRP minimizes the sum of the fixed facility location, transportation, and inventory carrying costs. The model simultaneously determines warehouse locations, shipment sizes from the plant to the warehouses, the working inventory, and safety stock levels at the warehouses and the assignment of retailers to the warehouses. The costs at each warehouse exhibit initially economies of scale and then an exponential increase due to the capacity limitations. We show that this problem can be formulated as a nonlinear integer program in which the objective function is neither concave nor convex. A Lagrangian relaxation solution algorithm is proposed. The Lagrangian subproblem is also a nonlinear integer program. An efficient algorithm is developed for the linear relaxation of this subproblem. The Lagrangian relaxation algorithm provides near‐optimal solutions with reasonable computational requirements for large problem instances. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

What you should know about location modeling

Facility location models have been applied to problems in the public and private sectors for years. In this article, the author first presents a taxonomy of location problems based on the underlying space in which the problem is embedded. The article illustrates problems from each part of the taxonomy with an emphasis on discrete location problems. Selected recent research in the area is also discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008