DEFENSE SPENDING AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN TURKEY: A LINEAR AND NON‐LINEAR GRANGER CAUSALITY APPROACH

This paper uses linear and non‐linear Granger causality methods to determine the causal relationship between defense spending and economic growth in Turkey for the period 1949–2004. The innovative feature of this paper is that it provides evidence regarding the nonlinear causal dependence between military spending and economic growth in Turkey. The empirical results contribute to the empirical literature by indicating support for both linear and non‐linear causality between military expenditures and economic development and they may prove useful in theoretical and empirical research by regulators and policy makers.     

Dual‐ascent and primal heuristics for production‐assembly‐distribution system design

This article proposes two dual‐ascent algorithms and uses each in combination with a primal drop heuristic embedded within a branch and bound framework to solve the uncapacitated production assembly distribution system (i.e., supply chain) design problem, which is formulated as a mixed integer program. Computational results indicate that one approach, which combines primal drop and dual‐ascent heuristics, can solve instances within reasonable time and prescribes solutions with gaps between the primal and dual solution values that are less than 0.15%, an efficacy suiting it for actual large‐scale applications. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Component importance for linear consecutive‐ k ‐Out‐of‐ n and m ‐Consecutive‐ k ‐Out‐of‐ n systems with exchangeable components

Measuring the relative importance of components in a mechanical system is useful for various purposes. In this article, we study Birnbaum and Barlow‐Proschan importance measures for two frequently studied system designs: linear consecutive k ‐out‐of‐ n and m ‐consecutive‐ k ‐out‐of‐ n systems. We obtain explicit expressions for the component importance measures for systems consisting of exchangeable components. We illustrate the results for a system whose components have a Lomax type lifetime distribution. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 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     

Comparison between constant‐stress and step‐stress accelerated life tests under Time Constraint

By running life tests at higher stress levels than normal operating conditions, accelerated life testing (ALT) quickly yields information on the lifetime distribution of a test unit. The lifetime at the design stress is then estimated through extrapolation using a regression model. In constant‐stress testing, a unit is tested at a fixed stress level until failure or the termination time point of test, whereas step‐stress testing allows the experimenter to gradually increase the stress levels at some prefixed time points during the test. In this work, the optimal k‐level constant‐stress and step‐stress ALTs are compared for the exponential failure data under complete sampling and Type‐I censoring. The objective is to quantify the advantage of using the step‐stress testing relative to the constant‐stress one. Assuming a log‐linear life–stress relationship with the cumulative exposure model for the effect of changing stress in step‐stress testing, the optimal design points are determined under C/D/A‐optimality criteria. The efficiency of step‐stress testing to constant‐stress one is then discussed in terms of the ratio of optimal objective functions based on the information matrix. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 00: 000–000, 2013     

The effect of catastrophes on the strategic customer behavior in queueing systems

We consider the single server Markovian queue subject to Poisson generated catastrophes. Whenever a catastrophe occurs, all customers are forced to abandon the system, the server is rendered inoperative and an exponential repair time is set on. During the repair time new arrivals are allowed to join the system. We assume that the arriving customers decide whether to join the system or balk, based on a natural linear reward‐cost structure with two types of rewards: A (usual) service reward for those customers that receive service and a (compensation) failure reward for those customers that are forced to abandon the system due to a catastrophe. We study the strategic behavior of the customers regarding balking and derive the corresponding (Nash) equilibrium strategies for the observable and unobservable cases. We show that both types of strategic behavior may be optimal: to avoid the crowd or to follow it. The crucial factor that determines the type of customer behavior is the relative value of the service reward to the failure compensation. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Steady-state analysis of load balancing with Coxian-2 distributed service times

This paper studies load balancing for many-server (N servers) systems. Each server has a buffer of size b ? 1, and can have at most one job in service and b ? 1 jobs in the buffer. The service time of a job follows the Coxian-2 distribution. We focus on steady-state performance of load balancing policies in the heavy traffic regime such that the normalized load of system is λ = 1 ? N^?α for 0 < α < 0.5. We identify a set of policies that achieve asymptotic zero waiting. The set of policies include several classical policies such as join-the-shortest-queue (JSQ), join-the-idle-queue (JIQ), idle-one-first (I1F) and power-of-d-choices (Po d) with d = O(N^α log N). The proof of the main result is based on Stein's method and state space collapse. A key technical contribution of this paper is the iterative state space collapse approach that leads to a simple generator approximation when applying Stein's method.     

Determination of burn‐in parameters and residual life for highly reliable products

Today, many products are designed and manufactured to function for a long period of time before they fail. Determining product reliability is a great challenge to manufacturers of highly reliable products with only a relatively short period of time available for internal life testing. In particular, it may be difficult to determine optimal burn‐in parameters and characterize the residual life distribution. A promising alternative is to use data on a quality characteristic (QC) whose degradation over time can be related to product failure. Typically, product failure corresponds to the first passage time of the degradation path beyond a critical value. If degradation paths can be modeled properly, one can predict failure time and determine the life distribution without actually observing failures. In this paper, we first use a Wiener process to describe the continuous degradation path of the quality characteristic of the product. A Wiener process allows nonconstant variance and nonzero correlation among data collected at different time points. We propose a decision rule for classifying a unit as normal or weak, and give an economic model for determining the optimal termination time and other parameters of a burn‐in test. Next, we propose a method for assessing the product's lifetime distribution of the passed units. The proposed methodologies are all based only on the product's initial observed degradation data. Finally, an example of an electronic product, namely contact image scanner (CIS), is used to illustrate the proposed procedure. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003     

A general model of heterogeneous system lifetimes and conditions for system burn‐in

Burn‐in is a technique to enhance reliability by eliminating weak items from a population of items having heterogeneous lifetimes. System burn‐in can improve system reliability, but the conditions for system burn‐in to be performed after component burn‐in remain a little understood mathematical challenge. To derive such conditions, we first introduce a general model of heterogeneous system lifetimes, in which the component burn‐in information and assembly problems are related to the prediction of system burn‐in. Many existing system burn‐in models become special cases and two important results are identified. First, heterogeneous system lifetimes can be understood naturally as a consequence of heterogeneous component lifetimes and heterogeneous assembly quality. Second, system burn‐in is effective if assembly quality variation in the components and connections which are arranged in series is greater than a threshold, where the threshold depends on the system structure and component failure rates. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 364–380, 2003.     

一种无人战斗机系统使用保障费用分析方法

基于无人战斗机系统在使用保障上的特点,通过对有人战斗机使用保障费用模型进行合理改造,使其能适用于无人战斗机的使用保障费用分析。经过改造的模型具有结构清晰、概念明确的特点。适合在飞机总体设计阶段用于全寿命周期的费用估算以及飞机的费效分析和综合优化设计。通过与有人战斗机的使用保障费用进行对比计算表明,无人战斗机系统的使用保障费用具有明显的经济优势。