DOES MILITARY EXPENDITURE MATTER FOR INFLATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH?

This paper sets up a monetary endogenous growth model, and uses it to explain the ambiguous linkage between the military burden and the inflation rate observed in existing empirical studies. It is found that an expansion in the military burden has an ambiguous effect on the inflation rate depending upon the relative extent of two conflicting forces. More specifically, if the increase in the marginal benefit from holding money exceeds (falls short of) the increase in the marginal product of private capital, the inflation rate will rise (fall) in response. Moreover, it is found that an increase in the military burden will stimulate the balanced growth rate, confirming Benoit’s famous empirical findings.     

Demand forecasting by temporal aggregation

Demand forecasting performance is subject to the uncertainty underlying the time series an organization is dealing with. There are many approaches that may be used to reduce uncertainty and thus to improve forecasting performance. One intuitively appealing such approach is to aggregate demand in lower‐frequency “time buckets.” The approach under concern is termed to as temporal aggregation, and in this article, we investigate its impact on forecasting performance. We assume that the nonaggregated demand follows either a moving average process of order one or a first‐order autoregressive process and a single exponential smoothing (SES) procedure is used to forecast demand. These demand processes are often encountered in practice and SES is one of the standard estimators used in industry. Theoretical mean‐squared error expressions are derived for the aggregated and nonaggregated demand to contrast the relevant forecasting performances. The theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive numerical investigation and experimentation with an empirical dataset. The results indicate that performance improvements achieved through the aggregation approach are a function of the aggregation level, the smoothing constant, and the process parameters. Valuable insights are offered to practitioners and the article closes with an agenda for further research in this area. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 479–498, 2013     

Some aspects in estimating warranty and post‐warranty repair demands

When customers buy a product, they are often eligible for free repairs for a certain warranty period. In this article, we study some important aspects, which are often overlooked in the literature but are of interest to the manufacturer, in estimating both warranty and post‐warranty repair demands. We consider that the installed base of the product (i.e., the number of units of the product actually in use) varies with time due to both new sales and units being taken out of service. When estimating warranty and post‐warranty repair demands, we explicitly address the fact that customers may not always request repairs for failed units. For the case where the product failure time distribution is exponential, we derive the closed‐form expressions for both types of repair demands of a single unit and of the time‐varying installed base. The insights into some risk‐related quantities are also presented. Furthermore, the proposed model is extended by considering delayed warranty claims that are frequently seen in practice. Numerical examples illustrate that understanding both types of repair demands and the related decision variables is important for managing the obligatory and profitable repair services. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 499–511, 2013     

地面防空作战部署评估仿真系统设计与实现

地面防空作战部署方案评估是防空作战中非常关键的一环,优良的地面防空作战部署方案是达到合理使用兵力、充分发扬火力、有效抗击空中之敌的重要前提。分析了地面防空作战部署方案评价指标体系,设计了仿真系统功能结构,探讨了仿真系统关键技术,实现了地面防空作战部署方案评估仿真系统,为指战员提供作战辅助决策。     

面向需求变化的军队自动化立体仓库货位优化

为提高军队自动化立体仓库的出库能力,提出应根据需求变化对在库物资货位进行动态调整,从而最大限度地保障军队物资需求。综合考虑堆垛机总行程、货物离散度和出库频率等评价指标,采用遗传算法对该多目标优化问题进行求解,并运用Matalab仿真。结果表明,该方法能较好地提高军队自动化立体仓库在需求动态变化时的出库能力。同时,该研究对一般仓库的货位优化也有一定的借鉴意义。     

The Demand for Military Spending in Egypt

Egypt plays a pivotal role in the security of the Middle East as the doorway to Europe and its military expenditure reflects its involvement in the machinations of such an unstable region, showing considerable variation over the last 40?years. These characteristics make it a particularly interesting case study of the determinants of military spending. This paper specifies and estimates an econometric model of the Egyptian demand for military spending, taking into account important strategic and political factors. Both economic and strategic factors are found to play a role in determining military burden/spending, with clear positive effects of lagged military burden, suggesting some sort of institutional inertia, plus negative output and net exports effects. The strategic effect as a result of the impact of Israel’s military burden is mostly positive and significant, though its impact is reduced when the impact of important strategic events are taken into account. The military spending of Egypt’s allies Jordan and Syria generally seems to have had no effect on Egypt’s spending. These results are consistent over a range of econometric techniques.     

India's Pursuit Of Ballistic Missile Defense

This article analyzes India's efforts to deploy a Ballistic Missile Program (BMD). The article has three objectives. First, it argues that scientific-bureaucratic factors and India's incapacity to deter Pakistan's use of terrorist proxies have driven its quest for BMD. Second, the article also evaluates the current state of India's two-tiered missile defense shield. In spite of various claims on the part of India's defense science establishment, the paper estimates that India still lacks a deployable BMD system and is still far from developing an effective strategy of deterrence-through-denial. Third, the article analyzes the implications of the development of India's BMD system for nuclear stability in South Asia. The article shows how India's BMD capacities, however limited, have indirectly exacerbated the security concerns of India's regional rival, Pakistan.     

基于备件需求预测的两步法理论

在对备件需求时间序列研究的基础上,结合指数平滑法和Croston法的特点,分析了指数平滑法与两步法的原理,通过对指数平滑法和两步法方差的研究,得到两步法是指数平滑法的一般形式的结论,为两步法的进一步研究提供一定的理论支撑。     

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.     

新型防空警戒雷达训练

在防空兵警戒雷达专业传统训练方法的基础上,结合新型警戒雷达技术体制特点,对新型警戒雷达训练进行的一系列探索,对于防空部队作战能力的提升起到了重要的推动作用。