A three‐stage procurement optimization problem under uncertainty

This article examines a problem faced by a firm procuring a material input or good from a set of suppliers. The cost to procure the material from any given supplier is concave in the amount ordered from the supplier, up to a supplier‐specific capacity limit. This NP‐hard problem is further complicated by the observation that capacities are often uncertain in practice, due for instance to production shortages at the suppliers, or competition from other firms. We accommodate this uncertainty in a worst‐case (robust) fashion by modeling an adversarial entity (which we call the “follower”) with a limited procurement budget. The follower reduces supplier capacity to maximize the minimum cost required for our firm to procure its required goods. To guard against uncertainty, the firm can “protect” any supplier at a cost (e.g., by signing a contract with the supplier that guarantees supply availability, or investing in machine upgrades that guarantee the supplier's ability to produce goods at a desired level), ensuring that the anticipated capacity of that supplier will indeed be available. The problem we consider is thus a three‐stage game in which the firm first chooses which suppliers' capacities to protect, the follower acts next to reduce capacity from unprotected suppliers, and the firm then satisfies its demand using the remaining capacity. We formulate a three‐stage mixed‐integer program that is well‐suited to decomposition techniques and develop an effective cutting‐plane algorithm for its solution. The corresponding algorithmic approach solves a sequence of scaled and relaxed problem instances, which enables solving problems having much larger data values when compared to standard techniques. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Review of the ordered and proportionate flow shop scheduling research

Ordered flow shop models have appeared in the literature since the mid‐1970s and proportionate flow shop models have appeared since the early 1980s. We provide a detailed review of these models along with some analysis and potential topics for future research. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Through the Looking Glass: The Soviet Military-Technical Revolution and the American Revolution in Military Affairs

The roots of the information technology Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) can be traced to the mid-1970s, when the West capitalized on scientific-technological developments to neutralize the threat posed by Soviet second echelons. However, the cultivation of the technological seeds of the American RMA preceded the maturation of the conceptual ones. Although it was the US that was laying the technological groundwork for the RMA, Soviet, rather than the American military theorists, were the first to argue that the new range of technological innovations constituted a fundamental discontinuity in the nature of war, which they dubbed the ‘Military-Technical Revolution’ (MTR). About a decade later, this fundamental Soviet approach to the transformations in military affairs was analyzed, adapted and adopted by the US, and designated the RMA. This article deals with the intellectual history of the Soviet MTR and the American RMA.     

British Armour and rearmament in the 1930s

This paper considers the contribution of military publishing to the nineteenth-century military revolution leading to the Great War. The subject is addressed in four contexts. The first is informational, analyzing the role of military publications in making available data and ideas that increased military effectiveness. The second is syncretic, evaluating the effect of military publications on cohesion within increasingly large, complex armies, and between armies and their societies. The third is internal. It discusses the contributions to professional insecurity generated by print, and by its electronic extensions the telegraph and the telephone. Finally, the paper considers the print revolution's influence on actual war-fighting     

Book Reviews

Iain McCallum, Blood Brothers Hiram and Hudson Maxim: Pioneers of Modern Warfare. London: Chatham, 1999. Pp. 224, 33 illus., 2 maps, biblio., index. £20. ISBN 1–86176–096–5.

Eric Ash, Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution, 1912–1918. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999. Pp.xviii + 268, 20 illus., 3 maps, biblio., index. £42.50/$59.50 (cloth), £18.50/$27.50 (paper). ISBN 0–7146–4828–0 and ‐4382–3.

Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and other Modernists. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Ppviii + 334, biblio., index. £45. ISBN 0–19–820715–8.

David B. Woolner (ed.), The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace: Canada, Great Britain, and the United States in 1944–1945. Basingstoke; London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Pp.xiii + 210, index. £32.50. ISBN 0–333–75970–2.

Jeffrey Grey. Up Top: The Royal Australian Navy and Southeast Asian Conflicts 1955–1972. St Leonards NSW: Allen &; Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1998. Pp.xx + 380, 110 illus., 12 tables, 23 maps &; diagrams, appendices, notes, biblio., index. NP. ISBN 1–86448–290–7.

Susan L Carruthers, The Media at War. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Pp.321, biblio., index. £14.99 (paper). ISBN 0–333–69143–1, also available in hardback.

Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller Jr, Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War. Washington DC: Naval Historical Center, 1998. Pp.xxi + 517, 120 illus., 14 maps, biblio., index. NP. ISBN 0–1604–9476–1.

Marvin Pokrant, Desert Shield at Sea: What the Navy Really Did and Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did. Both Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Pp.xxiii + 265,9 illus., biblio., index. £44.95. ISBN 0–313–31023–8. Pp.xxiv + 329,12 illus., biblio., index. NP. ISBN 0–313–31024–6.

David Kaularich and Ronald C. Kramer, Crimes of the American Nuclear State: At Home and Abroad. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. Pp.xviii + 195, biblio., index. £42.75. ISBN 1–55553–371‐X.

Stanley Hoffmann, World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post‐Cold War Era. Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield, 1998. Pp.viii+279, notes, index. $29.95. ISBN 0–8476–8574–8.

Lawrence Freedman (ed.), Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases. Oxford: Oxford‐University Press, 1998. Pp.400, index. £48. ISBN 0–19–829–349–6.

Stephen J. Cimbala, Coercive Military Strategy. College Station, TX: Texas A&;M University Press, 1998. Pp.229, biblio, index; $39.95. ISBN 0–89096–836–5     

Light weight HTPB-clay nanocomposites(HCN)with enhanced ablation performance as inhibition materials for composite propellant

In the present study,organically modified Montmorillonite clay with polar moiety,the Cloisite 30B,is used for preparation of Hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene(HTPB)-clay nanocomposites(HCN)by dispersion of nanoclay in polymer matrix under high shear mixing.The nanocomposites thus prepared are evaluated in composite propellants as inhibitor material for their functional utility.Several inhibition formulations containing 5 wt％-15 wt％of nanoclay,with or without the conventional filler Sb2O3,were prepared.All these formulations were evaluated for their physical,mechanical,thermal,and ablative properties.Ablation rate and density of the compositions containing Cloisite 30B is around 23％and 5％lower respectively in comparison of the base composition.Strain capability of these compositions is twofold higher than that of base composition.These compositions have also been evaluated for their smoke generation tendency by measuring infra red(IR)attenuation in the wavelength range 1.3 μm-5.6 μm and 8 μm-13 μm and thereby compared with the base composition.The corresponding results confirmed that the compositions containing Cloisite 30B as filler have much lower IR attenuation than compositions with conventional filler,Sb2O3.Replacement of 5％Sb2O3 by nanoclay showed 8％reduction in IR attenuation rate which further reduced to 16％on replacement of 15％of Sb2O3.Interfacial bonding of HCN based inhibitors is also comparable or even better than conventional inhibitors.Precisely,the nanoclay composites with Cloisite 30B as filler exhibit all desirable properties of an inhibitor.     

Algorithms for solving the conditional covering problem on paths

Consider the conditional covering problem on an undirected graph, where each node represents a site that must be covered by a facility, and facilities may only be established at these nodes. Each facility can cover all sites that lie within some common covering radius, except the site at which it is located. Although this problem is difficult to solve on general graphs, there exist special structures on which the problem is easily solvable. In this paper, we consider the special case in which the graph is a simple path. For the case in which facility location costs do not vary based on the site, we derive characteristics of the problem that lead to a linear‐time shortest path algorithm for solving the problem. When the facility location costs vary according to the site, we provide a more complex, but still polynomial‐time, dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal solution. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.