Newsvendor problems with sequentially revealed demand information

This article analyzes a capacity/inventory planning problem with a one‐time uncertain demand. There is a long procurement leadtime, but as some partial demand information is revealed, the firm is allowed to cancel some of the original capacity reservation at a certain fee or sell off some inventory at a lower price. The problem can be viewed as a generalization of the classic newsvendor problem and can be found in many applications. One key observation of the analysis is that the dynamic programming formulation of the problem is closely related to a recursion that arises in the study of a far more complex system, a series inventory system with stochastic demand over an infinite horizon. Using this equivalence, we characterize the optimal policy and assess the value of the additional demand information. We also extend the analysis to a richer model of information. Here, demand is driven by an underlying Markov process, representing economic conditions, weather, market competition, and other environmental factors. Interestingly, under this more general model, the connection to the series inventory system is different. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2012     

Models and algorithms for shuffling problems in steel plants

In this article, we study item shuffling (IS) problems arising in the logistics system of steel production. An IS problem here is to optimize shuffling operations needed in retrieving a sequence of steel items from a warehouse served by a crane. There are two types of such problems, plate shuffling problems (PSP) and coil shuffling problems (CSP), considering the item shapes. The PSP is modeled as a container storage location assignment problem. For CSP, a novel linear integer programming model is formulated considering the practical stacking and shuffling features. Several valid inequalities are constructed to accelerate the solving of the models. Some properties of optimal solutions of PSP and CSP are also derived. Because of the strong NP‐hardness of the problems, we consider some special cases of them and propose polynomial time algorithms to obtain optimal solutions for these cases. A greedy heuristic is proposed to solve the general problems and its worst‐case performances on both PSP and CSP are analyzed. A tabu search (TS) method with a tabu list of variable length is proposed to further improve the heuristic solutions. Without considering the crane traveling distance, we then construct a rolling variable horizon heuristic for the problems. Numerical experiments show that the proposed heuristic algorithms and the TS method are effective. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

灵巧噪声干扰本质及相关基本问题探讨

为正确理解和实施灵巧噪声干扰,基于匹配滤波器理论对灵巧噪声干扰的本质含义进行了分析。指出,灵巧噪声干扰的本质含义是使干扰由多个分量组成,并且使干扰中的每一个分量的频谱都与雷达发射信号的频谱相同,从而使干扰中的每一个分量的功率利用效率都达到最大。最后,从理论和实践2个角度,阐述了与灵巧噪声干扰相关的基本问题,并进行了相应的分析。