Estimating defence budget saving from disarmament: the United States’ case

Probing the technology in the production of US national defence by using a dynamic cost‐function model with adjustment costs, this paper evaluates the effect of reducing the level of national defence on the defence budget saving. Our inquiry involves estimating the defence production structure without output data for non‐market goods that are normally unavailable. Our findings include: (i) the United States behaves rationally to minimize cost in the production of national defence; (ii) the adjustment costs are larger in disarmament than in military build‐up; (iii) due to the adjustment costs peculiar to disarmament, the defence budget saving from disarmament appears small, but cutbacks allow great savings on the defence budget.     

The structure of the defense industry and the security needs of the country: a differentiated products model

This paper models the interactions between the defense needs of the USA and Western Europe, which produce several heterogeneous defense goods, and the defense industry market structure. The results show that net defense costs of the USA and Europe are lower when the number of defense firms in each arms‐producing country is small and when the world prices of the defense goods are high. The model predicts that the increase in world prices will crowd‐out countries in the developing world from the market for modern weapon systems and may force them to develop and use ‘cheap and dirty’ weapon systems.     

THE EFFECTS OF THE WORLD DEFENSE INDUSTRY AND US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL ON THE ISRAELI DEFENSE INDUSTRY: A DIFFERENTIATED PRODUCTS MODEL

This paper models the interactions between the defense industry market structure and the defense needs of Israel, the USA and Western Europe, which produce several heterogeneous defense goods. The model specifies that the defense industries of the US and Europe are ‘large’ while that of Israel is ‘small’. The US military aid to Israel is also an integral part of the model. The results show that net defense costs of Israel are minimal when the number of its defense firms is one. The model predicts that an increase in US military aid reduces Israel’s government expenditure, its defense industry’s profits and its net defense costs.     

Some aging properties of parallel and series systems with a random number of components

In this article, we study aging properties of parallel and series systems with a random number of components. We show that the decreasing likelihood ratio property is closed under the formation of random minima. We also show, by counterexamples, that other aging properties are not closed under the formation of random minima or maxima. Some mistakes in the literature are corrected. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 238–243, 2014     

Approximation algorithms for capacitated stochastic inventory systems with setup costs

We develop the first approximation algorithm with worst‐case performance guarantee for capacitated stochastic periodic‐review inventory systems with setup costs. The structure of the optimal control policy for such systems is extremely complicated, and indeed, only some partial characterization is available. Thus, finding provably near‐optimal control policies has been an open challenge. In this article, we construct computationally efficient approximate optimal policies for these systems whose demands can be nonstationary and/or correlated over time, and show that these policies have a worst‐case performance guarantee of 4. We demonstrate through extensive numerical studies that the policies empirically perform well, and they are significantly better than the theoretical worst‐case guarantees. We also extend the analyses and results to the case with batch ordering constraints, where the order size has to be an integer multiple of a base load. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 304–319, 2014     

Optimal control policies for an inventory system with commitment lead time

We consider a firm which faces a Poisson customer demand and uses a base‐stock policy to replenish its inventories from an outside supplier with a fixed lead time. The firm can use a preorder strategy which allows the customers to place their orders before their actual need. The time from a customer's order until the date a product is actually needed is called commitment lead time. The firm pays a commitment cost which is strictly increasing and convex in the length of the commitment lead time. For such a system, we prove the optimality of bang‐bang and all‐or‐nothing policies for the commitment lead time and the base‐stock policy, respectively. We study the case where the commitment cost is linear in the length of the commitment lead time in detail. We show that there exists a unit commitment cost threshold which dictates the optimality of either a buy‐to‐order (BTO) or a buy‐to‐stock strategy. The unit commitment cost threshold is increasing in the unit holding and backordering costs and decreasing in the mean lead time demand. We determine the conditions on the unit commitment cost for profitability of the BTO strategy and study the case with a compound Poisson customer demand.     

基于Tornado码的复制算法

面向Internet的分布存储系统具有数据种类多、数据量大、分布广泛等特点,为了提高分布存储系统的数据访问效率,提出了一种基于Tornado码的复制算法。与传统的复制算法相比,基于Tornado码的复制算法能够提供更高的可用性、持久性和安全性,并且具有更低的存储开销和带宽开销。     

软件构件可靠性与费用分配最优模型

针对软件构件可靠性和费用分配问题,给出一种可靠性和费用分配最优模型。文中将软件系统可靠性定义为软件构件失效密度、操作剖面、构件使用矩阵以及软件无失效运行时间的函数,描述了费用最优模型的建立和利用非线性规划理论求解模型的步骤,有效地处理了带有复杂计算的目标函数和约束条件的可靠性和费用最优分配问题。计算实例表明,利用该模型进行可靠性和费用分配是可行的。     

最小费用树

本文在赋边权w和顶点权θ的网络中,建立了最小费用树问题的网络模型。文中对问题的复杂性进行了讨论并给出了求解问题的算法     

基于循环子空间理论的线性系统测试矩阵优化

研究了线性定常系统在循环指数大于1(即其约当标准形不同的约当块有重根)的情况下测试矩阵的优化方法.以循环子空间相关定理的证明为基础,根据根向量链的相关特性,得到了测试向量的线性和与系统观测性的直接关系,给出了在保证系统可观测性的同时,使得测试代价最小的测试矩阵优化方法.算例表明,提出的方法简单直观,对配置测试向量具有良好的工程价值.