Technical note: Reexamination of all‐or‐none inspection policies in a supply chain with endogenous product quality

This note studies the optimal inspection policies in a supply chain in which a manufacturer purchases components from a supplier but has no direct control of component quality. The manufacturer uses an inspection policy and a damage cost sharing contract to encourage the supplier to improve the component quality. We find that all‐or‐none inspection policies are optimal for the manufacturer if the supplier's share of the damage cost is larger than a threshold; otherwise, the manufacturer should inspect a fraction of a batch. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Scheduling and due‐date quotation in a make‐to‐order supply chain

We consider a manufacturer, served by a single supplier, who has to quote due dates to arriving customers in a make‐to‐order production environment. The manufacturer is penalized for long lead times and for missing due dates. To meet due dates, the manufacturer has to obtain components from a supplier. We model this manufacturer and supplier as a two‐machine flow shop, consider several variations of this problem, and design effective due‐date quotation and scheduling algorithms for centralized and decentralized versions of the model. We perform extensive computational testing to assess the effectiveness of our algorithms and to compare the centralized and decentralized models to quantify the value of centralized control in a make‐to‐order supply chain. Since complete information exchange and centralized control is not always practical or cost‐effective, we explore the value of partial information exchange for this system. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

DEA models for two‐stage processes: Game approach and efficiency decomposition

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units (DMUs). This tool has been utilized by a number of authors to examine two‐stage processes, where all the outputs from the first stage are the only inputs to the second stage. The current article examines and extends these models using game theory concepts. The resulting models are linear, and imply an efficiency decomposition where the overall efficiency of the two‐stage process is a product of the efficiencies of the two individual stages. When there is only one intermediate measure connecting the two stages, both the noncooperative and centralized models yield the same results as applying the standard DEA model to the two stages separately. As a result, the efficiency decomposition is unique. While the noncooperative approach yields a unique efficiency decomposition under multiple intermediate measures, the centralized approach is likely to yield multiple decompositions. Models are developed to test whether the efficiency decomposition arising from the centralized approach is unique. The relations among the noncooperative, centralized, and standard DEA approaches are investigated. Two real world data sets and a randomly generated data set are used to demonstrate the models and verify our findings. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

A new importance sampling Monte Carlo method for a flow network reliability problem

The exact evaluation of the probability that the maximum st‐flow is greater than or equal to a fixed demand in a stochastic flow network is an NP‐hard problem. This limitation leads one to consider Monte Carlo alternatives. In this paper, we propose a new importance sampling Monte Carlo method. It is based on a recursive use of the state space decomposition methodology of Doulliez and Jamoulle during the simulation process. We show theoretically that the resulting estimator belongs to the variance‐reduction family and we give an upper bound on its variance. As shown by experimental tests, the new sampling principle offers, in many cases, substantial speedups with respect to a previous importance sampling based on the same decomposition procedure and its best performances are obtained when highly reliable networks are analyzed. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 204–228, 2002; DOI 10.1002/nav.10004     

Simultaneous determination of production and maintenance schedules using in‐line equipment condition and yield information

In many manufacturing environments, equipment condition has a significant impact on product quality, or yield. This paper presents a semi‐Markov decision process model of a single‐stage production system with multiple products and multiple maintenance actions. The model simultaneously determines maintenance and production schedules, accounting for the fact that equipment condition affects the yield of each product differently. It extends earlier work by allowing the expected time between decision epochs to vary by both action and machine state, by allowing multiple maintenance actions, and by treating the outcome of maintenance as less than certain. Sufficient conditions are developed that ensure the monotonicity of both the optimal production and maintenance actions. While the maintenance conditions closely resemble previously studied conditions for this type of problem, the production conditions represent a significant departure from earlier results. The simultaneous solution method is compared to an approach commonly used in industry, where the maintenance and production problems are treated independently. Solving more than one thousand test problems confirms that the combination of both features of the model—accounting for product differences and solving the problems simultaneously—has a significant impact on performance. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Dynamic evacuation routes for personnel on a naval ship

We propose a dynamic escape route system for emergency evacuation of a naval ship. The system employs signals that adapt to the causative contingency and the crew's physical distribution about the ship. A mixed‐integer nonlinear programming model, with underlying network structure, optimizes the evacuation process. The network's nodes represent compartments, closures (e.g., doors and hatches) and intersections, while arcs represent various types of passageways. The objective function integrates two potentially conflicting factors: average evacuation time and the watertight and airtight integrity of the ship after evacuation. A heuristic solves the model approximately using a sequence of mixed‐integer linear approximating problems. Using data for a Spanish frigate, with standard static routes specified by the ship's designers, computational tests show that the dynamic system can reduce average evacuation times, nearly 23%, and can improve a combined measure of ship integrity by up to 50%. In addition, plausible design changes to the frigate yield further, substantial improvements. Published 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2008     

Delivery‐date and capacity management in a decentralized internal market

We study competitive due‐date and capacity management between the marketing and engineering divisions within an engineer‐to‐order (ETO) firm. Marketing interacts directly with the customers and quotes due‐dates for their orders. Engineering is primarily concerned with the efficient utilization of resources and is willing to increase capacity if the cost is compensated. The two divisions share the responsibility for timely delivery of the jobs. We model the interaction between marketing and engineering as a Nash game and investigate the effect of internal competition on the equilibrium decisions. We observe that the internal competition not only degrades the firm's overall profitability but also the serviceability. Finally, we extend our analysis to multiple‐job settings that consider both flexible and inflexible capacity. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Approximation schemes for single‐machine scheduling with a fixed maintenance activity to minimize the total amount of late work

We consider the problem of scheduling n independent and simultaneously available jobs without preemption on a single machine, where the machine has a fixed maintenance activity. The objective is to find the optimal job sequence to minimize the total amount of late work, where the late work of a job is the amount of processing of the job that is performed after its due date. We first discuss the approximability of the problem. We then develop two pseudo‐polynomial dynamic programming algorithms and a fully polynomial‐time approximation scheme for the problem. Finally, we conduct extensive numerical studies to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 172–183, 2016     

Validation of a strategy for harbor defense based on the use of a min‐max algorithm receding horizon control law

We present a validation of a centralized feedback control law for robotic or partially robotic water craft whose task is to defend a harbor from an intruding fleet of water craft. Our work was motivated by the need to provide harbor defenses against hostile, possibly suicidal intruders, preferably using unmanned craft to limit potential casualties. Our feedback control law is a sample‐data receding horizon control law, which requires the solution of a complex max‐min problem at the start of each sample time. In developing this control law, we had to deal with three challenges. The first was to develop a max‐min problem that captures realistically the nature of the defense‐intrusion game. The second was to ensure the solution of this max‐min problem can be accomplished in a small fraction of the sample time that would be needed to control a possibly fast moving craft. The third, to which this article is dedicated, was to validate the effectiveness of our control law first through computer simulations pitting a computer against a computer or a computer against a human, then through the use of model hovercraft in a laboratory, and finally on the Chesapeake Bay, using Yard Patrol boats. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 247–259, 2016     

Approximations for heavily loaded G/GI/n + GI queues

Motivated by applications to service systems, we develop simple engineering approximation formulas for the steady‐state performance of heavily loaded G/GI/n+GI multiserver queues, which can have non‐Poisson and nonrenewal arrivals and non‐exponential service‐time and patience‐time distributions. The formulas are based on recently established Gaussian many‐server heavy‐traffic limits in the efficiency‐driven (ED) regime, where the traffic intensity is fixed at ρ > 1, but the approximations also apply to systems in the quality‐and‐ED regime, where ρ > 1 but ρ is close to 1. Good performance across a wide range of parameters is obtained by making heuristic refinements, the main one being truncation of the queue length and waiting time approximations to nonnegative values. Simulation experiments show that the proposed approximations are effective for large‐scale queuing systems for a significant range of the traffic intensity ρ and the abandonment rate θ, roughly for ρ > 1.02 and θ > 2.0. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 187–217, 2016