Scheduling to minimize release-time resource consumption and tardiness penalties

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of jobs with a common due-date on a single-machine where the release time of a job is related to the amount of resource consumed. The objective is to minimize the total resource consumption and the total tardiness. While the problem is strongly NP-hard in general, we discuss two different special cases for which special properties are identified and used to develop efficient pseudo-polynomial time algorithms. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Reviews

A. Hamish Ion and E.J. Errington (eds.), Great Powers and Little Wars: the Limits of Power. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. Pp.246, select biblio, index. $49.95. ISBN 0275–93965–0

John M. Rothgeb, Jr., Defining Power: Influence and Force in the Contemporary International System. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. Pp.205. $39.95 (hbk); $18.70 (pbk). ISBN 0312–086–822 and 061–056

Brian L. Job (ed.), The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security in Third World States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992, Pp.257. $37. ISBN 1–55587–267–0

Edwin G. Corr and Stephen Sloan (eds.), Low‐Intensity Conflict: Old Threats in a New World. Westview Studies in Regional Security, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992. Pp.310, maps, figures, index. $55 (hbk); $18.85 (pbk). ISBN 0–8133–8593–8 and 8594–6     

Contracting Out Security

Private security companies (PSCs) currently receive a great deal of attention in the news media, in sensationalist reporting, and increasingly in scholarly books and articles. While the scholarly books and articles make significant contributions to our understanding of this global phenomenon, there are several impediments to analysis that must be recognized and overcome if analysis is to be improved. Three of these impediments are reviewed in this article. The author suggests that US government material is currently available to minimize impediments and offers a framework to make analytical sense of it. Since contracting out is based on contracts, and unless the complexities of awarding and managing contracts are understood, recommendations made to reform the process of contracting out security are unrealistic.     

On mixed integer quadratic programs

This paper provides a method for solving mixed integer quadratic programs with the help of cutting-plane technique.     

On nash subsets of bimatrix games

This work considers a class of bimatrix games to which some well-known structure theorems of 0-sum matrix games can be made to generalize. It is additionally shown how to construct such games and how to generate the equilibrium points defining a given game as a member of that class.