Damage functions and estimates of fratricide and collateral damage

There are multiple damage functions in the literature to estimate the probability that a single weapon detonation destroys a point target. This paper addresses differences in the tails of four of the more popular damage functions. These four cover the asymptotic tail behaviors of all monotonically decreasing damage functions with well‐behaved hazard functions. The differences in estimates of probability of kill are quite dramatic for large aim‐point offsets. This is particularly important when balancing the number of threats that can be engaged with the chances of fratricide and collateral damage. In general, analysts substituting one damage function for another may badly estimate kill probabilities in offset‐aiming, which could result in poor doctrine. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 306–321, 2003.     

Resource efficiency in aircraft production

This article examines measures of economic efficiency in aircraft production. In particular, a type of nonlinear frontier estimation is contrasted with more traditional methods for estimating a dynamic cost function. This cost function is grounded in economic theory, and it is consistent with knowledge of the aircraft-production process. The model includes the effects of both learning and production rate on total program costs. The usefulness of the model is demonstrated with an example that relates to the acquisition of military equipment. It is shown through various sensitivity analyses that an alternative procurement policy for an aircraft program could have resulted in increased efficiency and hence a lower total program cost to the government.     

A nonidentical parallel processor scheduling problem

The problem considered in this article is a generalization of the familiar makespan problem, in which n jobs are allocated among m parallel processors, so as to minimize the maximum time (or cost) on any processor. Our problem is more general, in that we allow the processors to have (a) different initial costs, (b) different utilization levels before new costs are incurred, and (c) different rates of cost increase. A heuristic adapted from the bin-packing problem is shown to provide solutions which are close to optimal as the number of iterations is allowed to increase. Computational testing, over a large number of randomly generated problem instances, suggests that heuristic errors are, on average, very small.     

Spaghetti: systems thinking and the US Army

In the mid-2000s, the United States Army was embroiled in counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan that required deeper understanding of local social systems. The Army turned to systems thinking and design thinking to model and understand the world, define problems, and develop approaches to strategic and operational challenges. However, the Army’s approach as expressed in publications and doctrine encourages the development of complicated, unsupported, and unfalsifiable hypotheses. The risk is that the Army will act on incorrect assumptions and develop plans that are fragile.     

Evergreening and operational risk under price competition

“Evergreening” is a strategy wherein an innovative pharmaceutical firm introduces an upgrade of its current product when the patent on this product expires. The upgrade is introduced with a new patent and is designed to counter competition from generic manufacturers that seek to imitate the firm's existing product. However, this process is fraught with uncertainty because the upgrade is subject to stringent guidelines and faces approval risk. Thus, an incumbent firm has to make an upfront production capacity investment without clarity on whether the upgrade will reach the market. This uncertainty may also affect the capacity investment of a competing manufacturer who introduces a generic version of the incumbent's existing product but whose market demand depends on the success or failure of the upgrade. We analyze a game where capacity investment occurs before uncertainty resolution and firms compete on prices thereafter. Capacity considerations that arise due to demand uncertainty introduce new factors into the evergreening decision. Equilibrium analysis reveals that the upgrade's estimated approval probability needs to exceed a threshold for the incumbent to invest in evergreening. This threshold for evergreening increases as the intensity of competition in the generic market increases. If evergreening is optimal, the incumbent's capacity investment is either decreasing or nonmonotonic with respect to low end market competition depending on whether the level of product improvement in the upgrade is low or high. If the entrant faces a capacity constraint, then the probability threshold for evergreening is higher than the case where the entrant is not capacity constrained. Finally, by incorporating the risk‐return trade‐off that the incumbent faces in terms of the level of product improvement versus the upgrade success probability, we can characterize policy for a regulator. We show that the introduction of capacity considerations may maximize market coverage and/or social surplus at incremental levels of product improvement in the upgrade. This is contrary to the prevalent view of regulators who seek to curtail evergreening involving incremental product improvement. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 71–89, 2016     

Impediments to Fighting the Islamic State: Private Contractors and US Strategy

The United States has returned to Iraq, this time to combat the Islamic State. President Barack Obama’s strategy to ‘degrade, and ultimately destroy the terrorist group’ faces serious problems due to political obstacles in obtaining Congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and more importantly because of neglect of the crucial role of private contractors. Although the narrative has changed, and there is no public mention of contractors, they remain central to all that the Department of Defense does in the US and abroad. Suggestions are offered on how their performance can be improved to support President Obama’s strategy.     

Level workforce planning for multistage transfer lines

In this article, we define two different workforce leveling objectives for serial transfer lines. Each job is to be processed on each transfer station for c time periods (e.g., hours). We assume that the number of workers needed to complete each operation of a job in precisely c periods is given. Jobs transfer forward synchronously after every production cycle (i.e., c periods). We study two leveling objectives: maximin workforce size () and min range (R). Leveling objectives produce schedules where the cumulative number of workers needed in all stations of a transfer line does not experience dramatic changes from one production cycle to the next. For and a two‐station system, we develop a fast polynomial algorithm. The range problem is known to be NP‐complete. For the two‐station system, we develop a very fast optimal algorithm that uses a tight lower bound and an efficient procedure for finding complementary Hamiltonian cycles in bipartite graphs. Via a computational experiment, we demonstrate that range schedules are superior because not only do they limit the workforce fluctuations from one production cycle to the next, but they also do so with a minor increase in the total workforce size. We extend our results to the m‐station system and develop heuristic algorithms. We find that these heuristics work poorly for min range (R), which indicates that special structural properties of the m‐station problem need to be identified before we can develop efficient algorithms. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 577–590, 2016     

A note on efficient sequences with respect to total flow time and number of tardy jobs

For the single‐machine scheduling problem with the objective of simultaneously minimizing total flow time and number of tardy jobs, a lower bound on the number of efficient sequences is known. However, the proof thereof, which makes use of a modified version of Smith's algorithm, is unduly lengthy and sophisticated. Adopting a totally new point of view, we present in this short article a much simpler proof based on the naive idea of pairwise interchange. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 346–348, 2016     

Variance of the number of units produced on a transfer line with buffer inventories during a period of length T

The transfer-line models in the literature are planning models rather than operational models. That is, they are very useful for planning or designing the transfer line, but are less useful for controlling the daily operation of the line. The performance measure used in these models is the efficiency of the line A. The expected number of units produced during a period of length T cycles is AT. In this article a procedure is presented for calculating the variance of the number of units produced by the transfer line during a period of length T cycles. These two performance measures can be used to construct an interval estimate for, say, the number of units produced during a shift. This interval estimate is an operational guide for the production manager.