Inventory management with advance capacity information

An important aspect of supply chain management is dealing with demand and supply uncertainty. The uncertainty of future supply can be reduced if a company is able to obtain advance capacity information (ACI) about future supply/production capacity availability from its supplier. We address a periodic‐review inventory system under stochastic demand and stochastic limited supply, for which ACI is available. We show that the optimal ordering policy is a state‐dependent base‐stock policy characterized by a base‐stock level that is a function of ACI. We establish a link with inventory models that use advance demand information (ADI) by developing a capacitated inventory system with ADI, and we show that equivalence can only be set under a very specific and restrictive assumption, implying that ADI insights will not necessarily hold in the ACI environment. Our numerical results reveal several managerial insights. In particular, we show that ACI is most beneficial when there is sufficient flexibility to react to anticipated demand and supply capacity mismatches. Further, most of the benefits can be achieved with only limited future visibility. We also show that the system parameters affecting the value of ACI interact in a complex way and therefore need to be considered in an integrated manner. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Optimal burn‐in procedure for periodically inspected systems

Burn‐in is a widely used method to improve the quality of products or systems after they have been produced. In this paper, we study burn‐in procedure for a system that is maintained under periodic inspection and perfect repair policy. Assuming that the underlying lifetime distribution of a system has an initially decreasing and/or eventually increasing failure rate function, we derive upper and lower bounds for the optimal burn‐in time, which maximizes the system availability. Furthermore, adopting an age replacement policy, we derive upper and lower bounds for the optimal age parameter of the replacement policy for each fixed burn‐in time and a uniform upper bound for the optimal burn‐in time given the age replacement policy. These results can be used to reduce the numerical work for determining both optimal burn‐in time and optimal replacement policy. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

中美采办政策的若干差异和对策建议

通过对中美两国武器装备采办政策的对比分析,提出当前我国武器装备研制与管理政策方面的若干建议。     

Epidemics,national security,and US immigration policy

What are relationships between epidemics, national security, and US immigration policy? This question is important because it sheds light on transnational or nontraditional security areas, American immigration policy, and a pressing issue for US leaders who have recently faced epidemics such as the West Africa Ebola outbreak that began in 2013. This article answers it and lays ground in the area by reviewing epidemics in world history, using International Relations and Security Studies works to specify dangers of contagions for states, and identifying three general immigration measures that American leaders have utilized from the seventeenth century to the present day to protect against contagions, which are (1) policies restricting entrance of foreigners thought to carry specified diseases, (2) the isolation or quarantining of immigrants with contagious disease, and (3) delegating the President with authority to stop immigration in the event of an epidemic abroad. This study has implications for research and contemporary US immigration policy.     

The limits of robotic solutions to human challenges in the land domain

In the face of rapid technological change and the creation of ambitious military modernisation programmes, this paper argues that land forces, in managing the relationship between force levels and the adoption of military robotics, must recognise that there are inherent limits to techno-centric force reduction efforts and realise the inefficacy of substituting skilled soldiers with robots. It begins with an overview of how the proper integration of robotics into a military’s force structure can improve capability, save lives and potentially reduce costs, but suggests that common accounts of robot utility are exaggerated and endanger the risk assessment processes governing the adoption of said technologies and relevant personnel settings. The paper explores the limits of robotic solutions to military problems, discussing their technical limitations, redundancy and related issues that, when combined with a technico-moral skills degradation problem also detailed within, point to the need to reshape force structures to suit the adoption of robotics while preserving existing levels of human staffing.     

A survey of performance issues in defence innovation

This article reviews innovation processes in defence. It analyses the way and the context under which these processes are carried out. The article covers the features of defence goods with impact on innovation, the development of a new good, the institutional arrangements that support these processes and the effect of innovation on industrial market. The analysis helps to identify the causes of facts observed in practice, such as poor performance in terms of product quality, cost or delivery time, as well as to assess potential remedies. Some policy implications, which can be derived from this analysis, are finally outlined.     

外军反舰导弹装备使用现状及发展趋势研究

反舰导弹作为海上舰船＂杀手＂,其发展一直倍受各国海军关注。文章对反舰导弹的发展历程进行了回顾,对目前外军已经装备和正在研发的典型反舰导弹进行了分析和研究。以此为基础,对未来反舰导弹的发展趋势进行了探讨和展望,提出未来新型反舰导弹将趋于超远程化、超高速化、超隐身化、网络化和智能化。     

论重要外宾警卫勤务应遵循的原则

重要外宾警卫勤务是警卫工作的重要组成部分,也是外交工作的重要内容。重要外宾来华访问的成功与否,安全保卫工作发挥着举足轻重的作用。公安部门在履行重要外宾警卫工作职责使命时,必须严格遵守坚守安全第一、严守外事纪律、坚持以我为主、遵循国际惯例、落实外交对等、维护国家利益和民族尊严、注重举止有度、遵守国家法律法规等八项原则。     

Assessing the value of demand sharing in supply chains

We consider the problem of assessing the value of demand sharing in a multistage supply chain in which the retailer observes stationary autoregressive moving average demand with Gaussian white noise (shocks). Similar to previous research, we assume each supply chain player constructs its best linear forecast of the leadtime demand and uses it to determine the order quantity via a periodic review myopic order‐up‐to policy. We demonstrate how a typical supply chain player can determine the extent of its available information in the presence of demand sharing by studying the properties of the moving average polynomials of adjacent supply chain players. The retailer's demand is driven by the random shocks appearing in the autoregressive moving average representation for its demand. Under the assumptions we will make in this article, to the retailer, knowing the shock information is equivalent to knowing the demand process (assuming that the model parameters are also known). Thus (in the event of sharing) the retailer's demand sequence and shock sequence would contain the same information to the retailer's supplier. We will show that, once we consider the dynamics of demand propagation further up the chain, it may be that a player's demand and shock sequences will contain different levels of information for an upstream player. Hence, we study how a player can determine its available information under demand sharing, and use this information to forecast leadtime demand. We characterize the value of demand sharing for a typical supply chain player. Furthermore, we show conditions under which (i) it is equivalent to no sharing, (ii) it is equivalent to full information shock sharing, and (iii) it is intermediate in value to the two previously described arrangements. Although it follows from existing literature that demand sharing is equivalent to full information shock sharing between a retailer and supplier, we demonstrate and characterize when this result does not generalize to upstream supply chain players. We then show that demand propagates through a supply chain where any player may share nothing, its demand, or its full information shocks (FIS) with an adjacent upstream player as quasi‐ARMA in—quasi‐ARMA out. We also provide a convenient form for the propagation of demand in a supply chain that will lend itself to future research applications. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 515–531, 2014     

Offsets as industrial policy: Lessons from aerospace

Since 1975 “offsets” have begun to appear frequently in contracts covering international sales of aircraft and other products incorporating advanced technology. Offsets involve reciprocity beyond that normally found in an exchange of goods for money. They may involve co‐production or co‐design of the principal item to be exchanged, or acceptance by the seller of goods or services unrelated to it as partial payment (indirect offsets or countertrade).

The United States has become the major provider of offsets and anti‐offset sentiment has grown. Economists interpret them as trade diverting. Politicians from regions suffering loss of employment view them as bestowing unfair advantage to foreign competitors.

The authors examine offsets from both theoretical and policy perspectives and conclude that in such noncompetitive markets, second‐best considerations dominate, requiring case‐by‐case evaluation of impacts and rendering across‐the‐board determinations of welfare loss suspect.