How to deal with consumers who group to request a discount?

We investigate operations impacts of consumer‐initiated group buying (CGB), whereby consumers voluntarily form buying groups to negotiate bulk deals with retailers. This differs from regular purchasing whereby consumers visit retailers individually and pay posted prices. Upon the visit by group consumers, a retailer decides to forgo or satisfy their demand in its entirety. Turned down by a retailer, group consumers continue to visit other retailers. In the case where their group effort fails to conclude a deal, some group consumers switch to individual purchasing provided they receive a non‐negative utility by doing so. Even after a successful group event, the group consumers who forgo the event out of utility concern may switch to individual purchasing as well. Retailer competition, group size, and the chance that group consumers switch to individual purchasing upon unsatisfaction are crucial to how retailers adjust operations to deal with CGB. With retailer competition, the rise of CGB results in every consumer paying the same reduced price when group size is small but makes group consumers pay more than by purchasing individually when group size is large. This has mixed consequences on the profits for retailers in both absolute and relative terms.     

Revenue sharing contracts in a supply chain with uncontractible actions

We consider a supplier–customer relationship where the customer faces a typical Newsvendor problem of determining perishable capacity to meet uncertain demand. The customer outsources a critical, demand‐enhancing service to an outside supplier, who receives a fixed share of the revenue from the customer. Given such a linear sharing contract, the customer chooses capacity and the service supplier chooses service effort level before demand is realized. We consider the two cases when these decisions are made simultaneously (simultaneous game) or sequentially (sequential game). For each game, we analyze how the equilibrium solutions vary with the parameters of the problem. We show that in the equilibrium, it is possible that either the customer's capacity increases or the service supplier's effort level decreases when the supplier receives a larger share of the revenue. We also show that given the same sharing contract, the sequential game always induces a higher capacity and more effort. For the case of additive effort effect and uniform demand distribution, we consider the customer's problem of designing the optimal contract with or without a fixed payment in the contract, and obtain sensitivity results on how the optimal contract depends on the problem parameters. For the case of fixed payment, it is optimal to allocate more revenue to the supplier to induce more service effort when the profit margin is higher, the cost of effort is lower, effort is more effective in stimulating demand, the variability of demand is smaller or the supplier makes the first move in the sequential game. For the case of no fixed payment, however, it is optimal to allocate more revenue to the supplier when the variability of demand is larger or its mean is smaller. Numerical examples are analyzed to validate the sensitivity results for the case of normal demand distribution and to provide more managerial insights. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

A refined deterministic linear program for the network revenue management problem with customer choice behavior

We present a new deterministic linear program for the network revenue management problem with customer choice behavior. The novel aspect of our linear program is that it naturally generates bid prices that depend on how much time is left until the time of departure. Similar to the earlier linear program used by van Ryzin and Liu (2004), the optimal objective value of our linear program provides an upper bound on the optimal total expected revenue over the planning horizon. In addition, the percent gap between the optimal objective value of our linear program and the optimal total expected revenue diminishes in an asymptotic regime where the leg capacities and the number of time periods in the planning horizon increase linearly with the same rate. Computational experiments indicate that when compared with the linear program that appears in the existing literature, our linear program can provide tighter upper bounds, and the control policies that are based on our linear program can obtain higher total expected revenues. © 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     

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     

基于改进协方差控制的传感器管理算法

针对传统的基于协方差控制的传感器管理算法使用全遍历方法所造成的计算量大,以及传感器切换频繁的问题,提出了一种基于改进协方差控制的传感器管理算法。该算法在每一时刻首先判断前一时刻所用传感器组是否能够满足目标跟踪需求,以滤波协方差与期望协方差的偏差作为参考,结合量纲变换和特征值求取,为协方差偏差矩阵经过量纲变换后得到的量纲一致阵的所有特征值设定一个精度阈值,然后判断滤波协方差是否满足期望,从而决定是否维持当前选择的传感器组。在目标作匀速、匀加速、协同转弯等多种场景下进行了算法性能测试分析,仿真结果表明,该算法不仅在大部分场景下满足目标跟踪精度,而且能够提高传感器管理算法的实时性,同时降低传感器的切换频率。     

兵棋推演：复杂系统管理的创新与实践

复杂系统性质决定了复杂系统管理的特殊性,而兵棋推演可以为复杂系统管理提供更加符合其特性的决策辅助支持。讨论了复杂系统的性质及其影响,研究了兵棋推演用于复杂系统管理的原因和方法,并结合战争兵棋推演,介绍了兵棋工程建设中系统研发、推演组织和工程管理方面的创新与实践问题。最后,给出了未来发展的趋势。     

基于规则的动态频谱接入研究

动态频谱接入面临的关键技术之一是对接入时机和方式进行有效地管控,防止由于频谱的接入使用过于灵活造成用频的干扰和混乱。将频谱接入的时间和方式给予规则上的约束和指导,基于规则构建动态频谱管理框架可以有效实现频谱的实时管控。对动态频谱接入的规则及表述方式进行了讨论,分析了基于规则的动态频谱接入过程,最后结合美军XG项目的试验结果分析了基于规则的动态频谱接入的应用前景。     

基于增强现实的装备诱导维修系统设计与实现

针对目前装备维修过程中存在的复杂度高、上手慢和安全性低等问题,构建了一个诱导维修原型系统,并围绕增强现实关键技术阐述了诱导维修系统的设计与实现;采用了模块化设计方法,通过分析诱导维修系统设计需求,对系统所需要的各个功能模块进行了设计,并且使得系统的维修任务能够根据维修对象的改变在框架不变的前提下得到修改或升级;利用该原型系统对发动机活塞环和离合器片更换两项维修任务进行了诱导,验证了系统的功能。