A parametric-based heuristic program for the quadratic assignment problem

In this article we study the quadratic assignment problem by embedding the actual data in a data space which satisfies an extension of the metric triangle property. This leads to simpler computations for the determination of heuristic solutions. Bounds are given for the loss of optimality which such heuristic solutions would involve in any specific instance. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

混合尺寸目标电磁计算的时域伪谱/有限体积混合方法

针对单一算法对混合尺寸目标进行时域电磁分析的困难,提出一种时域伪谱(PSTD)同时域有限体积(FVTD)混合方法。FVTD可方便地分析复杂的几何结构和材料,但是难以计算电大尺寸的目标,PSTD则特别适合计算电大尺寸的规则结构,但在模拟复杂的几何结构尤其是带有曲边结构以及电大、电小共存结构时存在困难。混合方法克服了单独算法的缺点,融合各自的优势,提高了算法的求解能力和应用范围。为了减小两种算法连接边界带来的反射,采用了FVTD计算面均值的二次函数重构方法,给出了交叠网格和非交叠网格两种混合方案。数值试验表明,混合方法有较高的精度,具有时域分析混合尺寸目标电磁问题的能力。     

Killing Your Own: Confronting Desertion and Cowardice in the British Army During the Two World Wars

Military units can become to some extent self-governing in war-time battle. At times, they may take the discipline of their soldiers into their own hands and such discipline may be severe. This paper examines incidents in the British military, in both World Wars, where British soldiers were killed by their comrades because they would not fight in the heat of battle. The judicial execution by the military authorities of deserters in the First World War led to much controversy in Britain. It may be much less well-known that in both World Wars there was, on occasion, an extra-judicial practice within the British military of executing soldiers who would not fight in the heat of battle. In such situations ethical dilemmas become very difficult indeed and some of the relevant issues are examined here.     

Scheduling with tool changes to minimize total completion time: A study of heuristics and their performance

The machine scheduling literature does not consider the issue of tool change. The parallel literature on tool management addresses this issue but assumes that the change is due only to part mix. In practice, however, a tool change is caused most frequently by tool wear. That is why we consider here the problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a single CNC machine where the cutting tool is subject to wear; our objective is to minimize the total completion time. We first describe the problem and discuss its peculiarities. After briefly reviewing available theoretical results, we then go on to provide a mixed 0–1 linear programming model for the exact solution of the problem; this is useful in solving problem instances with up to 20 jobs and has been used in our computational study. As our main contribution, we next propose a number of heuristic algorithms based on simple dispatch rules and generic search. We then discuss the results of a computational study where the performance of the various heuristics is tested; we note that the well‐known SPT rule remains good when the tool change time is small but deteriorates as this time increases and further that the proposed algorithms promise significant improvement over the SPT rule. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003     

Algorithmic insights and a convergence analysis for a Karmarkar-type of algorithm for linear programming problems

This paper is concerned with a modification of a recently proposed variant of Karmarkar's algorithm for solving linear programming problems. In analyzing this variant, we exhibit interesting and useful relationships of these types of algorithms with barrier function methods, and subgradient optimization procedures involving space dilation techniques, which subsume the well-known ellipsoidal type of algorithms. Convergence of this variant is established under certain regularity conditions. We also provide remarks on how to obtain dual variables or Lagrange multipliers at optimality.