Balancing stability and efficiency in team formation as a generalized roommate problem

The assignment of personnel to teams is a fundamental managerial function typically involving several objectives and a variety of idiosyncratic practical constraints. Despite the prevalence of this task in practice, the process is seldom approached as an optimization problem over the reported preferences of all agents. This is due in part to the underlying computational complexity that occurs when intra-team interpersonal interactions are taken into consideration, and also due to game-theoretic considerations, when those taking part in the process are self-interested agents. Variants of this fundamental decision problem arise in a number of settings, including, for example, human resources and project management, military platooning, ride sharing, data clustering, and in assigning students to group projects. In this article, we study an analytical approach to “team formation” focused on the interplay between two of the most common objectives considered in the related literature: economic efficiency (i.e., the maximization of social welfare) and game-theoretic stability (e.g., finding a core solution when one exists). With a weighted objective across these two goals, the problem is modeled as a bi-level binary optimization problem, and transformed into a single-level, exponentially sized binary integer program. We then devise a branch-cut-and-price algorithm and demonstrate its efficacy through an extensive set of simulations, with favorable comparisons to other algorithms from the literature.     

网络作战能力评估研究

近年来,国内外学者对网络作战能力评估问题进行了大量深入的研究,并取得了很多重要成果,但是缺乏对该领域研究现状的归纳与总结。网络作战能力评估主要涉及指标体系构建、指标权重确定以及评估方法的选择,归纳了3种网络作战能力评估指标体系构建方法及划分角度,并进行对比分析;梳理了3种评估指标权重确定方法,并对其特点进行总结;介绍了几种常见网络作战能力评估方法。为组织网络作战能力评估提供一定的借鉴和参考。     

航空加权网络抗毁性综合评估方法

根据目前网络抗毁性研究中指标单一、网络无权等不足,针对航空网络的特点,以流量为边权,提出了一种多指标的航空网络抗毁性评估方法。基于网络吞吐量、相似权网络流量、节点相邻边权重分布分别构建了鲁棒性度量、网络效率度量、网络适应性度量。最后通过建立西北地区航空网络进行仿真,结果表明:西北地区航空网络具有与星型网络相似的性能,鲁棒性较差,网络效率较好,咸阳和乌鲁木齐作为中心节点,具有较好的主抗性能。实验结果证明了该评估方法的有效性。     

基于网络结构的武器装备体系能力分析

现代战争以及从"平台为中心"转向以"网络为中心",强调的是通过各类武器平台通过相互之间的协作配合而形成作战网络来实现体系能力。从宏观和微观两个角度分析了武器装备体系能力的实现机理,构建了武器装备体系的作战网络结构模型,给出了作战网络结构模型中的节点类型和关系类型,提出了能力环的概念,从作战网络结构的角度对武器装备体系的整体能力进行了分析,并给出了具体算例。     

THE SUPPLY PRICE OF COMMITMENT: EVIDENCE FROM THE AIR FORCE ENLISTMENT BONUS PROGRAM

In fiscal year 1999, the US Air Force introduced a bonus program designed to encourage longer enlistment terms. This regime shift provides a unique opportunity to estimate the elasticity of labor supply at a new margin: the length of the employment contract. A $5000 bonus differential is estimated to increase the probability that a recruit will choose a 6‐year enlistment over a 4‐year enlistment by 30 percentage points. The program is found to be cost‐effective relative to other policies to increase man‐years.     

A three‐stage procurement optimization problem under uncertainty

This article examines a problem faced by a firm procuring a material input or good from a set of suppliers. The cost to procure the material from any given supplier is concave in the amount ordered from the supplier, up to a supplier‐specific capacity limit. This NP‐hard problem is further complicated by the observation that capacities are often uncertain in practice, due for instance to production shortages at the suppliers, or competition from other firms. We accommodate this uncertainty in a worst‐case (robust) fashion by modeling an adversarial entity (which we call the “follower”) with a limited procurement budget. The follower reduces supplier capacity to maximize the minimum cost required for our firm to procure its required goods. To guard against uncertainty, the firm can “protect” any supplier at a cost (e.g., by signing a contract with the supplier that guarantees supply availability, or investing in machine upgrades that guarantee the supplier's ability to produce goods at a desired level), ensuring that the anticipated capacity of that supplier will indeed be available. The problem we consider is thus a three‐stage game in which the firm first chooses which suppliers' capacities to protect, the follower acts next to reduce capacity from unprotected suppliers, and the firm then satisfies its demand using the remaining capacity. We formulate a three‐stage mixed‐integer program that is well‐suited to decomposition techniques and develop an effective cutting‐plane algorithm for its solution. The corresponding algorithmic approach solves a sequence of scaled and relaxed problem instances, which enables solving problems having much larger data values when compared to standard techniques. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

New results on rendezvous search on the interval

In a rendezvous search problem, two players are placed in a network and must try to meet each other in the least possible expected time. We look at rendezvous search on a discrete interval in which the players are initially placed using independent draws (usually assumed to be from the same distribution). Some optimal solutions are known if this distribution is uniform, and also for certain other special types of distribution. In this article, we present two new results. First, we characterize the complete set of solutions for the uniform case, showing that all optimal strategies must have two specific properties (namely, of being swept and strictly geodesic). Second, we relate search strategies on the interval to proper binary trees, and use this correspondence to derive a recurrence relation for solutions to the symmetric rendezvous problem for any initial distribution. This relation allows us to solve any such problem computationally by dynamic programming. Finally, some ideas for future research are discussed. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 454–467, 2013     

沿海船舶边防治安管理立法问题研究

沿海船舶边防治安管理是维护海上治安秩序稳定的重要手段。为加强海上治安管理,需要通过立法活动赋予公安边防机关特殊的执法权,并以此规范公安边防行政执法活动。分析沿海船舶边防治安管理立法概况及其存在的问题,提出完善沿海船舶边防治安管理立法的建议。     

遗传神经网络在保障资源需求预测中的应用

针对现代战争条件下装备保障资源需求变化快,保障资源预测困难的问题,首先分析了影响装备保障资源需求的因素,根据实际情况选取了平均维修间隔时间(MTBM)、平均修复时间(MTBR)等8项影响装备保障资源需求的关键指标,然后将基于遗传算法(GA)优化的反向传播(BP)神经网络应用于保障资源需求预测中,构建了基于遗传神经网络的需求预测模型,最后利用1980年～2010年实际保障资源需求数据对模型进行了验证.验证结果表明,基于GA优化的BP神经网络预测模型有较快的收敛速度、较强的适应性和较高的预测精度,适用于装备保障资源需求预测.     

基于流量均衡和跨层技术的星群路由算法

针对分布式星群网络业务通信QoS不高的问题,提出了一种基于流量均衡和跨层技术的分布式星群网络路由算法(TACA)。该算法首先通过跨层技术将物理层、MAC层的相关信息搜集起来,作为判断链路负载状况的依据;然后对不同类型的业务进行分类,根据链路负载状况和业务QoS级别选择不同的路由层次,从而均衡流量以提高QoS。仿真表明,该路由算法在一定程度上降低了星群的呼叫阻塞率和切换阻塞率,平衡了网络的负载,提高了网络吞吐量。