Spaghetti: systems thinking and the US Army

In the mid-2000s, the United States Army was embroiled in counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan that required deeper understanding of local social systems. The Army turned to systems thinking and design thinking to model and understand the world, define problems, and develop approaches to strategic and operational challenges. However, the Army’s approach as expressed in publications and doctrine encourages the development of complicated, unsupported, and unfalsifiable hypotheses. The risk is that the Army will act on incorrect assumptions and develop plans that are fragile.     

Adaptive random search for continuous simulation optimization

We present, analyze, and compare three random search methods for solving stochastic optimization problems with uncountable feasible regions. Our adaptive search with resampling (ASR) approach is a framework for designing provably convergent algorithms that are adaptive and may consequently involve local search. The deterministic and stochastic shrinking ball (DSB and SSB) approaches are also convergent, but they are based on pure random search with the only difference being the estimator of the optimal solution [the DSB method was originally proposed and analyzed by Baumert and Smith]. The three methods use different techniques to reduce the effects of noise in the estimated objective function values. Our ASR method achieves this goal through resampling of already sampled points, whereas the DSB and SSB approaches address it by averaging observations in balls that shrink with time. We present conditions under which the three methods are convergent, both in probability and almost surely, and provide a limited computational study aimed at comparing the methods. Although further investigation is needed, our numerical results suggest that the ASR approach is promising, especially for difficult problems where the probability of identifying good solutions using pure random search is small. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

Equivalent accelerated life testing plans for log‐location‐scale distributions

Accelerated life testing (ALT) is widely used to determine the failure time distribution of a product and the associated life‐stress relationship in order to predict the product's reliability under normal operating conditions. Many types of stress loadings such as constant‐stress, step‐stress and cyclic‐stress can be utilized when conducting ALT. Extensive research has been conducted on the analysis of ALT data obtained under a specified stress loading. However, the equivalency of ALT experiments involving different stress loadings has not been investigated. In this article, a log‐location‐scale distribution under Type I censoring is considered in planning ALT. An idea is provided for the equivalency of various ALT plans involving different stress loadings. Based on this idea, general equivalent ALT plans and some special types of equivalent ALT plans are explored. For demonstration, a constant‐stress ALT and a ramp‐stress ALT for miniature lamps are presented and their equivalency is investigated. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

The Pervasive Role of Rank in the Health of U.S. Veterans

The following article tests the hypothesis that veterans have better health if they were officers when they were in the U.S. military than if they served in the enlisted ranks. It examines this hypothesis by presenting results from logistic regressions that are based on four surveys: the National Survey of Veterans, the Survey of Retired Military, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. In all four of these surveys, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that military rank is associated with health, particularly among veterans who served longer. It also suggests that the health gradient by rank is independent of similar gradients by education and income as well as health differences by race. These findings indicate that health may be influenced not just by differences in civilian society but also by those in the military.     

Deterministic chaos in a model of discrete manufacturing

A natural extension of the bucket brigade model of manufacturing is capable of chaotic behavior in which the product intercompletion times are, in effect, random, even though the model is completely deterministic. This is, we believe, the first proven instance of chaos in discrete manufacturing. Chaotic behavior represents a new challenge to the traditional tools of engineering management to reduce variability in production lines. Fortunately, if configured correctly, a bucket brigade assembly line can avoid such pathologies. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Optimizing fishbone aisles for dual‐command operations in a warehouse

Unit‐load warehouses store and retrieve unit‐loads, typically pallets. When storage and retrieval operations are not coordinated, travel is from a pickup and deposit (P&D) point to a pallet location and back again. In some facilities, workers interleave storage and retrieval operations to form a dual‐command cycle. Two new aisle designs proposed by Gue and Meller (“Improving the unit‐load warehouse.” In Progress in Material Handling Research: 2006. Material Handling Industry of America, Charlotte, NC, 2006) use diagonal aisles to reduce the travel distance to a single pallet location by approximately 10 and 20[percnt] for the two designs, respectively. We develop analytical expressions for travel between pallet locations for one of these—the fishbone design. We then compare fishbone warehouses that have been optimized for dual‐command to traditional warehouses that have been optimized in the same manner, and show that an optimal fishbone design reduces dual‐command travel by 10–15%. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 54: 389–403, 2009     

Transporting jobs through a two‐machine open shop

We consider the two‐machine open shop scheduling problem in which the jobs are brought to the system by a single transporter and moved between the processing machines by the same transporter. The purpose is to split the jobs into batches and to find the sequence of moves of the transporter so that the time by which the completed jobs are collected together on board the transporter is minimal. We present a ‐approximation algorithm. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Design and control of agile automated CONWIP production lines

In this article, we study the design and control of manufacturing cells with a mix of manual and automated equipment, operating under a CONWIP pull protocol, and staffed by a single agile (cross‐trained) worker. For a three‐station line with one automated station, we fully characterize the structure of the optimal control policy for the worker and show that it is a static priority policy. Using analytical models and extensive simulation experiments, we also evaluate the effectiveness of practical heuristic control policies and provide managerial insights on automation configuration design of the line. This characterization of the worker control policy enables us to develop managerial insights into the design issues of how best to locate and concentrate automation in the line. Finally, we show that, in addition to ease of control and greater design flexibility, the CONWIP protocol also offers higher efficiency and robustness than does the push protocol. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

An economic sequential screening procedure for limited failure populations

An economic sequential screening procedure is considered for limited failure populations in which defective items fail soon after they are put in operation and nondefective ones never fail during the technical life of the items. A cost model is constructed that involves screening test cost and external failure cost. A sequential scheme that minimizes the expected cost is derived from the solution of a dynamic programming formulation and the optimal decision at each stage is obtained in a closed form. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.