Another inventory model with a mixture of backorders and lost sales

This article presents another inventory model for situations in which, during the stockout period, a fraction b of the demand is backordered and the remaining fraction 1 ? b is lost. By defining a time-proportional backorder cost and a fixed penalty cost per unit lost, a unimodal objective function representing the average annual cost of operating the inventory system is obtained. The optimal operating policy variables are calculated directly.     

“Disarmament Market” Effects of Information Disclosures

In yet another wave of discussion on nuclear disarmament among political scientists and practitioners, one of the topical issues concerns the problem of transparency, its mechanisms, costs, and benefits. Numerous—though often abstract—calls for greater transparency of nuclear arsenals and postures when promoting the idea of nuclear disarmament, however, do not give a clear rationale for states possessing nuclear weapons to pursue greater transparency. Meanwhile, many other research fields—such as economics and psychology—attempt to address problems related to the lack of exact information on the counterpart's activities and intentions. Economics offers one probable analog for the transparency problem: the issue of information asymmetry and its consequences. This article is an attempt to apply the classical model of a market with information asymmetry to the analysis of the transparency problem within the nuclear disarmament process. Such an approach could help pave the way for closer cooperation between economic and political scientists in the nuclear disarmament field.     

Applying Lanchester's linear law to model the Ardennes campaign

In modern warfare, many believe the decisive factor in winning a battle is seizing the right moment to shift from defense to attack, or vice versa. This paper attempts to bring that perspective to Lanchester's differential equations of warfare, and continues the application of Lanchester's linear law to the analysis of the World War II battle of Ardennes, as reported in earlier issues of Naval Research Logistics by Bracken and by Fricker. A new variable, shift time, accounting for the timing of the shift between defense and attack is explicitly included in our version of the model, and it helps obtain improved goodness of fit to historical data. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48:653–661, 2001     

Variables inspection for SPC‐quarantined production

When a control chart signals an out‐of‐control condition for a production process, it may be desirable to “quarantine” all units produced since the last in‐control SPC sample. This paper presents an efficient procedure for variables inspection of such “SPC quarantined” product. A Bayesian sequential inspection procedure is developed which determines whether the out of control production is of acceptable quality. By inspecting the units in reverse of the order in which they were produced, the procedure is also capable of detecting the point at which the process went out of control, thus eliminating the need to inspect units produced prior to the onset of the out of control condition. Numerical examples are presented, and the performance characteristics of the procedure are demonstrated using Monte Carlo simulation. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 159–171, 2001