NUCLEAR REDUCTIONS AND MIDDLE EAST STABILITY

The United States faces a series of strategic and policy conundrums as it attempts to promote strategic stability in the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East. This article examines the relationship between a reduced US nuclear arsenal and strategic stability in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. It argues that a series of interrelated political and military factors play a much more significant role in regional security and stability than the US strategic arsenal, which has never, with a few extraordinary exceptions, played a direct role in maintaining regional security. The United States has constructed a system of regional stability based on conventional deterrence and defense that has seen it forward base forces at various installations in the region in combination with efforts to arm, train, and equip host-nation militaries. Nuclear weapons have never played a prominent role in this regional system. Evidence presented in this article suggests that there is no compelling reason for the United States to abandon and/or modify the defensive system of conventional deterrence and defense by adding nuclear-backed guarantees to the mix.     

End effects in capacity expansion models with finite horizons

Capacity expansion models are typically formulated in the context of some finite horizon. Because the firm lasts longer than the horizon, a bias can enter into the optimal solution from the model horizon chosen. Recently, Grinold [8] has proposed a “dual-equilibrium method” for ameliorating possible distortions. Although the dual-equilibrium method has superior analytical properties to other methods, it is conceptually more complex. In this paper it is shown that there are situations where the “primal-equilibrium” approach of Manne [15] provides equivalent results and that the use of annualized capital costs in the objective function, although somewhat less efficient, results in a similar model.     

The procurement problem: An integer programming problem well suited to a solution using duality

A procurement problem, as formulated by Murty [10], is that of determining how many pieces of equipment units of each of m types are to be purchased and how this equipment is to be distributed among n stations so as to maximize profit, subject to a budget constraint. We have considered a generalization of Murty's procurement problem and developed an approach using duality to exploit the special structure of this problem. By using our dual approach on Murty's original problem, we have been able to solve large problems (1840 integer variables) with very modest computational effort. The main feature of our approach is the idea of using the current evaluation of the dual problem to produce a good feasible solution to the primal problem. In turn, the availability of good feasible solutions to the primal makes it possible to use a very simple subgradient algorithm to solve the dual effectively.     

A time dependent continuous review inventory model with compound poisson demand

We discuss a time dependent optimal ordering policy for a finite horizon inventory system for which the provision of service is essential and thus no stockout is allowed. It is assumed that the system can place an order at any point in time during the horizon when it cannot meet the customer's demand and that lead time is negligible. The demand is considered to be distributed as a compound Poisson process with known parameters and the functional equation approach of dynamic programming is used to formulate the objective function. An algorithm has been developed to obtain the solution for all the cases. In addition, analytical solutions of the basic equation under two limiting conditions are presented.