Dynamic inventory control with limited capital and short‐term financing

For most firms, especially the small‐ and medium‐sized ones, the operational decisions are affected by their internal capital and ability to obtain external capital. However, the majority of the literature on dynamic inventory control ignores the firm's financial status and financing issues. An important question that arises is: what are the optimal inventory and financing policies for firms with limited internal capital and limited access to external capital? In this article, we study a dynamic inventory control problem where a capital‐constrained firm periodically purchases a product from a supplier and sells it to a market with random demands. In each period, the firm can use its own capital and/or borrow a short‐term loan to purchase the product, with the interest rate being nondecreasing in the loan size. The objective is to maximize the firm's expected terminal wealth at the end of the planning horizon. We show that the optimal inventory policy in each period is an equity‐level‐dependent base‐stock policy, where the equity level is the sum of the firm's capital level and the value of its on‐hand inventory evaluated at the purchasing cost; and the structure of the optimal policy can be characterized by four intervals of the equity level. Our results shed light on the dynamic inventory control for firms with limited capital and short‐term financing capabilities.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 184–201, 2014     

Strategic obfuscation of production capacities

Recent supply‐chain models that study competition among capacity‐constrained producers omit the possibility of producers strategically setting wholesale prices to create uncertainty with regards to (i.e., to obfuscate) their production capacities. To shed some light on this possibility, we study strategic obfuscation in a supply‐chain model comprised of two competing producers and a retailer, where one of the producers faces a privately‐known capacity constraint. We show that capacity obfuscation can strictly increase the obfuscating producer's profit, therefore, presenting a clear incentive for such practices. Moreover, we identify conditions under which both producers' profits increase. In effect, obfuscation enables producers to tacitly collude and charge higher wholesale prices by moderating competition between producers. The retailer, in contrast, suffers a loss in profit, raises retail prices, while overall channel profits decrease. We show that the extent of capacity obfuscation is limited by its cost and by a strategic retailer's incentive to facilitate a deterrence. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 244–267, 2014     

支持社会技术系统构造的程序设计模型和语言

互联网上越来越多软件系统呈现出社会与技术交融、环境多样和开放、系统动态和演化等特点,如何支持这类复杂软件系统的构造是软件工程面临的一项重要挑战。通过将社会技术系统视为多Agent组织,把社会组织学的概念和思想引入到面向Agent程序设计范畴,提出了以Agent、组织、角色和职位为核心的基于组织程序模型来支持社会技术系统的开发;通过对多Agent组织不同层次动态性的识别和分析,设计了一组程序设计机制来实现社会技术系统的动态演化;包括角色绑定和组合机制、基于角色的交互机制以及组织的自我管理机制。基于上述模型和机制,提出了社会技术系统程序设计语言OragentL,给出了OragentL程序在组织、角色和组合三个层次的语法形式定义,介绍了OragentL的编译器及其运行支撑环境OragentBurg,并通过案例分析和演示展示了研究成果的有效性。     

新形势下主流媒体在军校学员中的影响力调查分析

当前,随着以互联网技术为代表的信息科技的发展和进步,新兴媒体不断涌现,多元思想交织碰撞,主流媒体和信息受众开始出现新变化,传统媒体正遭受严峻挑战。文章基于具体的调查分析研究工作,采用调查问卷、座谈交流、专家座谈等多种调研方式,综合分析调查分析研究结果,提出以"搭好桥、建好网、备好粮、验好票"为核心的四点建议内容,为提升军校主流媒体影响力提供了参考借鉴。     

Monitoring the market or the salesperson? The value of information in a multilayer supply chain

We study a supply chain in which a manufacturer relies on a salesperson to sell the products to the consumers. The sales outcome is determined by a random market condition and the salesperson's service level, both of which are privately observed by the salesperson. Apart from them, there are two types of resellers: a knowledgeable reseller observes the market condition, whereas a diligent reseller can monitor the service level. While delegating to a reseller enhances information acquisition, it may also result in double marginalization and inefficiency. We identify several operating regimes in which double marginalization can be eliminated via simple contracts and establish the benefit of monitoring the salesperson over monitoring the market. Our dominance result is not prone to our model characteristics regarding the complementarity of market condition and sales effort, the relative importance of adverse selection and moral hazard, and the contract form. We then generalize our model and re‐establish the dominance result in the presence of reseller's risk aversion or private monitoring expertise. We also quantify the performance gaps among different selling schemes under various scenarios. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Exact algorithms for integrated facility location and production planning problems

We consider a class of facility location problems with a time dimension, which requires assigning every customer to a supply facility in each of a finite number of periods. Each facility must meet all assigned customer demand in every period at a minimum cost via its production and inventory decisions. We provide exact branch‐and‐price algorithms for this class of problems and several important variants. The corresponding pricing problem takes the form of an interesting class of production planning and order selection problems. This problem class requires selecting a set of orders that maximizes profit, defined as the revenue from selected orders minus production‐planning‐related costs incurred in fulfilling the selected orders. We provide polynomial‐time dynamic programming algorithms for this class of pricing problems, as well as for generalizations thereof. Computational testing indicates the advantage of our branch‐and‐price algorithm over various approaches that use commercial software packages. These tests also highlight the significant cost savings possible from integrating location with production and inventory decisions and demonstrate that the problem is rather insensitive to forecast errors associated with the demand streams. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

二苯氯胂气溶胶对大白鼠亚慢性吸入染毒研究

研究使用动式吸入暴露系统,进行二苯氯胂（DA）的大白鼠吸入暴露90d的亚I匣性毒性试验。结果表明,DA对大白鼠亚慢性吸入暴露毒性的主要靶器官为喉、气管、肺、肝、肾等器官,判定DA对大白鼠吸入暴露90d的最小有害作用浓度为5．1×10^-9g／L,最大无害作用浓度为1．8×10^-9g／L。     

Network disconnection problems in a centralized network

We consider three network disconnection problems in a centralized network where a source node provides service to the other nodes, called demand nodes. In network disconnection problems, each demand node gets a certain benefit when connected to a source node and a network attacker destroys edges to prevent demand nodes from achieving benefits. As destroying edges incurs expenses, an attacker considers the following three different strategies. The first is to maximize the sum of benefits of the disconnected nodes while keeping the total edge destruction cost no more than a given budget. The second is to minimize the total destruction cost needed to make a certain amount of benefits not accomplished. The last is to minimize the ratio of the total destruction cost to the benefits not accomplished. In this paper, we develop exact algorithms to solve the above three problems. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Dynamic lot‐sizing model with production time windows

We consider a dynamic lot‐sizing model with production time windows where each of n demands has earliest and latest production due dates and it must be satisfied during the given time window. For the case of nonspeculative cost structure, an O(nlogn) time procedure is developed and it is shown to run in O(n) when demands come in the order of latest production due dates. When the cost structure is somewhat general fixed plus linear that allows speculative motive, an optimal procedure with O(T⁴) is proposed where T is the length of a planning horizon. Finally, for the most general concave production cost structure, an optimal procedure with O(T⁵) is designed. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Exact expected values of variance estimators for simulation

We formulate exact expressions for the expected values of selected estimators of the variance parameter (that is, the sum of covariances at all lags) of a steady‐state simulation output process. Given in terms of the autocovariance function of the process, these expressions are derived for variance estimators based on the simulation analysis methods of nonoverlapping batch means, overlapping batch means, and standardized time series. Comparing estimator performance in a first‐order autoregressive process and the M/M/1 queue‐waiting‐time process, we find that certain standardized time series estimators outperform their competitors as the sample size becomes large. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007