On the application and extension of system signatures in engineering reliability

Following a review of the basic ideas in structural reliability, including signature‐based representation and preservation theorems for systems whose components have independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) lifetimes, extensions that apply to the comparison of coherent systems of different sizes, and stochastic mixtures of them, are obtained. It is then shown that these results may be extended to vectors of exchangeable random lifetimes. In particular, for arbitrary systems of sizes m < n with exchangeable component lifetimes, it is shown that the distribution of an m‐component system's lifetime can be written as a mixture of the distributions of k‐out‐of‐n systems. When the system has n components, the vector of coefficients in this mixture representation is precisely the signature of the system defined in Samaniego, IEEE Trans Reliabil R–34 (1985) 69–72. These mixture representations are then used to obtain new stochastic ordering properties for coherent or mixed systems of different sizes. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

微弱正弦信号在有噪声的FN神经元模型中的传输特性研究

长期以来弄清神经系统中的信号是如何传输的一直是广大研究人员努力的目标.针对一种被普遍研究的神经元简化模型--FitzHugh-nagumo(FN)模型,采用二阶随机龙格-库塔算法分析了该模型对加性噪声和微弱正弦信号的响应特性.时域和频域的统计参数表明适当强度的噪声有利于信号的传输,存在随机共振现象,即与噪声强度关联的输出信噪比曲线为倒钟形;另外值得关注的是,与正弦信号频率关联的输出信噪比曲线也为倒钟形,分析可见正弦信号的无量纲频率在区间0.2～0.8时模型的输出信噪比最大,表明该神经元模型有频率敏感性,即更易于检测到该范围内的弱信号.上述结果与生物学的发现是一致的,将有助于进一步揭示周期信号在神经元中的传输方法,建立更加准确的神经元数学模型.     

An approximate dynamic programing approach to the development of heuristics for the scheduling of impatient jobs in a clearing system

A single server is faced with a collection of jobs of varying duration and urgency. Each job has a random lifetime during which it is available for nonpreemptive service. Should a job's lifetime expire before its service begins then it is lost from the system unserved. The goal is to schedule the jobs for service to maximize the expected number served to completion. Two heuristics have been proposed in the literature. One (labeled π^S) operates a static priority among the job classes and works well in a “no premature job loss” limit, whereas the second (π^M) is a myopic heuristic which works well when lifetimes are short. Both can exhibit poor performance for problems at some distance from the regimes for which they were designed. We develop a robustly good heuristic by an approximative approach to the application of a policy improvement step to the asymptotically optimal heuristic π^S, in which we use a fluid model to obtain an approximation for the value function of π^S. The performance of the proposed heuristic is investigated in an extensive numerical study. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2010     

A stochastic approximation algorithm to compute bid prices for joint capacity allocation and overbooking over an airline network

In this article, we develop a stochastic approximation algorithm to find good bid price policies for the joint capacity allocation and overbooking problem over an airline network. Our approach is based on visualizing the total expected profit as a function of the bid prices and searching for a good set of bid prices by using the stochastic gradients of the total expected profit function. We show that the total expected profit function that we use is differentiable with respect to the bid prices and derive a simple expression that can be used to compute its stochastic gradients. We show that the iterates of our stochastic approximation algorithm converge to a stationary point of the total expected profit function with probability 1. Our computational experiments indicate that the bid prices computed by our approach perform significantly better than those computed by standard benchmark strategies and the performance of our approach is relatively insensitive to the frequency with which we recompute the bid prices over the planning horizon. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Signature based analysis of m‐Consecutive‐k‐out‐of‐n: F systems with exchangeable components

In this article, we study reliability properties of m‐consecutive‐k‐out‐of‐n: F systems with exchangeable components. We deduce exact formulae and recurrence relations for the signature of the system. Closed form expressions for the survival function and the lifetime distribution as a mixture of the distribution of order statistics are established as well. These representations facilitate the computation of several reliability characteristics of the system for a given exchangeable joint distribution or survival function. Finally, we provide signature‐based stochastic ordering results for the system's lifetime and investigate the IFR preservation property under the formulation of m‐consecutive‐k‐out‐of‐n: F systems. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Improving series and parallel systems through mixtures of duplicated dependent components

We discuss suitable conditions such that the lifetime of a series or of a parallel system formed by two components having nonindependent lifetimes may be stochastically improved by replacing the lifetimes of each of the components by an independent mixture of the individual components' lifetimes. We also characterize the classes of bivariate distributions where this phenomenon arises through a new weak dependence notion. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Annealing adaptive search,cross‐entropy,and stochastic approximation in global optimization

The Annealing Adaptive Search (AAS) algorithm for global optimization searches the solution space by sampling from a sequence of Boltzmann distributions. For a class of optimization problems, it has been shown that the complexity of AAS increases at most linearly in the problem dimension. However, despite its desirable property, sampling from a Boltzmann distribution at each iteration of the algorithm remains a practical challenge. Prior work to address this issue has focused on embedding Markov chain‐based sampling techniques within the AAS framework. In this article, based on ideas from the recent Cross‐Entropy method and Model Reference Adaptive Search, we propose an algorithm, called Model‐based Annealing Random Search (MARS), that complements prior work by sampling solutions from a sequence of surrogate distributions that iteratively approximate the target Boltzmann distributions. We establish a novel connection between MARS and the well‐known Stochastic Approximation method. By exploiting this connection, we prove the global convergence of MARS and characterize its asymptotic convergence rate behavior. Our empirical results indicate promising performance of the algorithm in comparison with some of the existing methods. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

云模型和混合Petri网相结合的系统可靠性评价

针对复杂系统可靠性评价中工作环境可变的情形,提出基于云模型和混合Petri网相结合的可靠性评价方法。首先采用云模型描述系统的环境适应能力指数,并将其作为混合Petri模型中连续库所的托肯值来控制该模型中变迁的变迁率,然后采用基于Petri网的蒙特卡罗方法对不同环境下的系统可靠性进行仿真求解,得到系统在不同时刻下的失效率。最后以一个C4ISR系统为例,验证了该方法在解决可变工作环境下的系统可靠性评估是可行的。     

低信噪比下融合随机共振的运动目标检测算法

为提高智能视频监控系统中运动目标检测算法在低信噪比条件下的鲁棒性,结合混合高斯背景建模算法和随机共振原理实现一种低信噪比下的运动目标检测算法。算法根据混合高斯背景模型对当前帧生成目标概率灰度图,在本文定义的性能评价函数下,通过向该概率灰度图添加噪声使得评价函数最优化从而达到随机共振,对该随机共振灰度图进行阈值分割得到输出的检测目标。针对昏暗、大雾和红外视频分别进行了实验,证实了本文算法的有效性同时也显示本文算法相对于普通背景差算法性能获得了明显提升。     

AGENDA FOR DEFENSE AND PEACE ECONOMICS

This brief introduction celebrates the 20th Anniversary of the Journal, Defence and Peace Economics. Suggesting elements of an agenda for the future of this branch of economics, I raise several topics that are new and that seem to indicate that the field will expand and shift focus substantially in future years.