微分对策及其在军事领域的研究进展*

介绍了微分对策的产生背景及其半个多世纪以来的发展历程,简述了国内外微分对策理论发展的几个重要阶段及其标志性成果。全面地阐述了国内外关于微分对策在军事领域的应用研究状况,特别是美、俄等军事强国在微分对策军事应用研究方面的现状以及我国研究人员在该领域的主要研究成果。还进一步论述了微分对策在军事应用研究方面存在的问题,并对微分对策的发展前景做出了展望,指出了微分对策在军事应用领域中的研究热点、难点和主要发展方向。     

联合作战的远程火力战法动态分析方法*

用定量动态分析方法开发远程火力战法是联合作战规划中必须解决的重要问题。借助仿真和博弈分析的混合方法,在对博弈效用函数计算的基础上,构建基于识别真目标、假目标以及火力命中目标概率的二人非零和(TPNZS)非合作博弈模型来开发远程火力战法动态分析方法,对两个典型的联合作战远程火力打击战法性能的初步动态分析表明:战场势态的动态变化直接影响定量规划最优战法的结果。     

悬浮式深弹在水面舰艇规避 尾流自导鱼雷作战中的应用研究*

针对传统对抗方法难以有效对抗尾流自导鱼雷这一问题,籍由悬浮式深弹拦截原理、在分析尾流自导鱼雷可能航向范围的基础上,建立悬浮式深弹作战使用等模型,对悬浮式深弹在水面舰艇规避尾流自导鱼雷中的作战使用问题进行了探讨。仿真结果表明:使用悬浮式深弹能有效地拦截尾流自导鱼雷,从而提高水面舰艇的生存能力。研究成果为研制新型反鱼雷装备、改进现有装备的战术技术性能提供了有价值的参考。     

Dynamic routing of prioritized warranty repairs

Recent years have seen a strong trend toward outsourcing warranty repair services to outside vendors. In this article we consider the problem of dynamically routing warranty repairs to service vendors when warranties have priority levels. Each time an item under warranty fails, it is sent to one of the vendors for repair. Items covered by higher priority warranty receive higher priority in repair service. The manufacturer pays a fixed fee per repair and incurs a linear holding cost while an item is undergoing or waiting for repair. The objective is to minimize the manufacturer's long‐run average cost. Because of the complexity of the problem, it is very unlikely that there exist tractable ways to find the optimal routing strategies. Therefore, we propose five heuristic routing procedures that are applicable to real‐life problems. We evaluate the heuristics using simulation. The simulation results show that the index‐based “generalized join the shortest queue” policy, which applies a single policy improvement step to an initial state‐independent policy, performs the best among all five heuristics. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Technical note: An improved range chart for normal and long‐tailed symmetrical distributions

The distribution of the range of a sample, even in the case of a normal distribution, is not symmetric. Shewhart's control chart for range and other approximations for range from skewed distributions and long‐tailed (leptokurtic) symmetrical distributions assume the distribution of range as symmetric and provide 3 sigma control limits. We provide accurate approximations for the R‐chart control limits for the leptokurtic symmetrical distributions, using a range quantile approximation (RQA) method and illustrate the use of the RQA method with a numerical example. As special cases, we provide constants for the R‐chart for the normal, logistic, and Laplace distributions. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

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     

Nash bargaining over allocations in inventory pooling contracts

When facing uncertain demand, several firms may consider pooling their inventories leading to the emergence of two key contractual issues. How much should each produce or purchase for inventory purposes? How should inventory be allocated when shortages occur to some of the firms? Previously, if the allocations issue was considered, it was undertaken through evaluation of the consequences of an arbitrary priority scheme. We consider both these issues within a Nash bargaining solution (NBS) cooperative framework. The firms may not be risk neutral, hence a nontransferable utility bargaining game is defined. Thus the physical pooling mechanism itself must benefit the firms, even without any monetary transfers. The firms may be asymmetric in the sense of having different unit production costs and unit revenues. Our assumption with respect to shortage allocation is that a firm not suffering from a shortfall, will not be affected by any of the other firms' shortages. For two risk neutral firms, the NBS is shown to award priority on all inventory produced to the firm with higher ratio of unit revenue to unit production cost. Nevertheless, the arrangement is also beneficial for the other firm contributing to the total production. We provide examples of Uniform and Bernoulli demand distributions, for which the problem can be solved analytically. For firms with constant absolute risk aversion, the agreement may not award priority to any firm. Analytically solvable examples allow additional insights, e.g. that higher risk aversion can, for some problem parameters, cause an increase in the sum of quantities produced, which is not the case in a single newsvendor setting. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Noncooperative cost spanning tree games with budget restrictions

We extend the noncooperative game associated with the cost spanning tree problem introduced by Bergantiños and Lorenzo (Math Method Oper Res 59(2004), 393–403) to situations where agents have budget restrictions. We study the Nash equilibria, subgame perfect Nash equilibria, and strong Nash equilibria of this game. © 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