Integrated capacity,demand, and production planning with subcontracting and overtime options

Models for integrated production and demand planning decisions can serve to improve a producer's ability to effectively match demand requirements with production capabilities. In contexts with price‐sensitive demands, economies of scale in production, and multiple capacity options, such integrated planning problems can quickly become complex. To address these complexities, this paper provides profit‐maximizing production planning models for determining optimal demand and internal production capacity levels under price‐sensitive deterministic demands, with subcontracting and overtime options. The models determine a producer's optimal price, production, inventory, subcontracting, overtime, and internal capacity levels, while accounting for production economies of scale and capacity costs through concave cost functions. We use polyhedral properties and dynamic programming techniques to provide polynomial‐time solution approaches for obtaining an optimal solution for this class of problems when the internal capacity level is time‐invariant. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

陕西文学旅游资源的开发生产与营销策划

陕西具有丰富的文学旅游资源,这些资源具有广阔的开发和利用空间。文章就陕西文学旅游资源开发现状进行分析,针对目前存在的问题提出开发生产和营销策略,即要处理好旅游主体、旅游客体和旅游媒体三者的关系,促进陕西旅游可持续发展。     

亚细亚生产方式研究概况及其意义

马克思在研究亚洲或东方社会的状况时,提到亚细亚生产方式的概念,对此概念的严格定义则不是马克思关注的焦点,他的关注点集中在东西生产方式的区别上,以及当时东方社会为何遭受到西方社会的打击,并在此基础上为包括东方国家在内的落后国家寻找一条出路。然而,后人却对亚细亚生产方式概念进行了各种各样的论争,这虽有时代背景上的原因,也有诸多理论上的原因,无疑也背离了马克思探讨亚细亚生产方式的原意。可是另一方面,通过对亚细亚生产方式的研究和争论,有助于了解包括中国在内的亚洲国家的历史和现状。了解自身历史的生产方式,以及和西欧生产方式进行对比,对于现代化进程中的中国有着很大的借鉴和启发意义。     

Optimal production ramp-up in the smartphone manufacturing industry

Motivated by challenges in the smartphone manufacturing industry, we develop a dynamic production ramp-up model that can be applied to economically satisfy nonstationary demand for short-life-cycle products by high-tech companies. Due to shorter life cycles and more rapid evolution of smartphones, production ramp-up has been increasingly critical to the success of a new smartphone. In the production ramp-up, the key challenge is to match the increasing capacity to nonstationary demand. The high-tech smartphone manufacturers are urged to jointly consider the effect of increasing capacity and decreasing demand. We study the production planning problem using a high-dimensional Markov decision process (MDP) model to characterize the production ramp-up. To address the curse of dimensionality, we refine Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm and theoretically analyze its convergence and computational complexity. In a real case study, we find that the MDP model achieves revenue improvement by stopping producing the existing product earlier than the benchmark policy. In synthetic instances, we validate that the proposed MCTS algorithm saves computation time without loss of solution quality compared with traditional value iteration algorithm. As part of the Lenovo production solution, our MDP model enables high-tech smartphone manufacturers to better plan the production ramp-up.     

谈英语教学中学生创造思维的培养

目前,我国外语教学普遍存在费时较多、收效较低的现象,特别是精读课教学,向来只注重给学生注入语言知识,而轻视学生创造思维能力的培养。要解决这一问题,外语教学工作者必须改变教学观念,避免在外语课教学中只重识记而轻思维这一现象。     

Missile systems: “Flexible modularity” and incremental technological change in military production∗

It is often stated that technological change in the military field is characterised by the introduction of radical innovations rather than by incremental processes of technological change. This article illustrates the diversity of military innovation by arguing that technological change in missiles systems is dominated by incremental change. While some large weapons platforms display the design rigidities normally associated with complex systems, missiles are characterised by “flexible modularity”. Flexible modularity facilitates the continuous introduction of upgrades, and makes missile systems amenable to gradual technological change. Besides, it has significant implications for the future role of missile systems, and poses special problems for missile disarmament and technology control initiatives.     

Country survey VIII: Federal republic of Yugoslavia

This survey article focuses on defence economics issues and provides data and analysis on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's (FRY) defence policy, defence spending, the size of its armed forces, its defence industries and the cost of the civil war. The main section is devoted to the period from 1990 to the present and deals with the following aspects: the situation after the break‐up of the former Yugoslavia, general economic data; the cost of the civil war, the defence budget; the armed forces; the manufacture of armaments and the structure of the defence industry.     

A PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS OF THE SECURITY AND DEFENCE TECHNOLOGICAL AND INDUSTRIAL BASE IN SPAIN

This study analyses the performance of the productivity of the main industrial subsectors composing the security and defence technological and industrial base (SDTIB) in Spain from 1996 to 2009. Accordingly, we have used the non-parametric data envelopment analysis and bootstrapping techniques to compute Malmquist productivity indexes that allow us to split productivity growth into efficiency change and technical progress. The results obtained show productivity improvement in the SDTIB as a whole due mainly to advances in technology and to a lesser extent to the contribution of technical efficiency. The bootstrap approach yields further evidence, as for many cases, productivity growth or decline, is not statistically significant. This is the first time a study of this kind has been carried out on the production process of this sector in Spain.     

The economic impact of peacekeeping. Evidence from South Sudan

This paper investigates the effect of the deployment of United Nations Blue Helmets on economic activity in South Sudan with a special focus on agricultural production. Since UN troops are predicted to improve security, in particular, we expect a positive relationship between deployment of UN blue Helmets and cereal production. We test our hypothesis using an original data-set including all the 78 South Sudanese counties over the period 2009–2011. We control for the non-random assignment of UN troops through an Instrumental Variables approach. Our empirical results show that a 10% increase in the size of the troop allows the production of additional 600 tonnes.     

Optimal joint preventive maintenance and production policies

We study joint preventive maintenance (PM) and production policies for an unreliable production‐inventory system in which maintenance/repair times are non‐negligible and stochastic. A joint policy decides (a) whether or not to perform PM and (b) if PM is not performed, then how much to produce. We consider a discrete‐time system, formulating the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) model. The focus of the work is on the structural properties of optimal joint policies, given the system state comprised of the system's age and the inventory level. Although our analysis indicates that the structure of optimal joint policies is very complex in general, we are able to characterize several properties regarding PM and production, including optimal production/maintenance actions under backlogging and high inventory levels, and conditions under which the PM portion of the joint policy has a control‐limit structure. In further special cases, such as when PM set‐up costs are negligible compared to PM times, we are able to establish some additional structural properties. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.