Revenue management under randomly evolving economic conditions

We consider a dynamic pricing model in which the instantaneous rate of the demand arrival process is dependent on not only the current price charged by the concerned firm, but also the present state of the world. While reflecting the current economic condition, the state evolves in a Markovian fashion. This model represents the real‐life situation in which the sales season is relatively long compared to the fast pace at which the outside environment changes. We establish the value of being better informed on the state of the world. When reasonable monotonicity conditions are met, we show that better present economic conditions will lead to higher prices. Our computational study is partially calibrated with real data. It demonstrates that the benefit of heeding varying economic conditions is on par with the value of embracing randomness in the demand process. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 66:73–89,2019     

Dynamic routing of prioritized warranty repairs

Recent years have seen a strong trend toward outsourcing warranty repair services to outside vendors. In this article we consider the problem of dynamically routing warranty repairs to service vendors when warranties have priority levels. Each time an item under warranty fails, it is sent to one of the vendors for repair. Items covered by higher priority warranty receive higher priority in repair service. The manufacturer pays a fixed fee per repair and incurs a linear holding cost while an item is undergoing or waiting for repair. The objective is to minimize the manufacturer's long‐run average cost. Because of the complexity of the problem, it is very unlikely that there exist tractable ways to find the optimal routing strategies. Therefore, we propose five heuristic routing procedures that are applicable to real‐life problems. We evaluate the heuristics using simulation. The simulation results show that the index‐based “generalized join the shortest queue” policy, which applies a single policy improvement step to an initial state‐independent policy, performs the best among all five heuristics. © 2007 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     

Technical note: An improved range chart for normal and long‐tailed symmetrical distributions

The distribution of the range of a sample, even in the case of a normal distribution, is not symmetric. Shewhart's control chart for range and other approximations for range from skewed distributions and long‐tailed (leptokurtic) symmetrical distributions assume the distribution of range as symmetric and provide 3 sigma control limits. We provide accurate approximations for the R‐chart control limits for the leptokurtic symmetrical distributions, using a range quantile approximation (RQA) method and illustrate the use of the RQA method with a numerical example. As special cases, we provide constants for the R‐chart for the normal, logistic, and Laplace distributions. © 2007 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     

DEA models for two‐stage processes: Game approach and efficiency decomposition

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units (DMUs). This tool has been utilized by a number of authors to examine two‐stage processes, where all the outputs from the first stage are the only inputs to the second stage. The current article examines and extends these models using game theory concepts. The resulting models are linear, and imply an efficiency decomposition where the overall efficiency of the two‐stage process is a product of the efficiencies of the two individual stages. When there is only one intermediate measure connecting the two stages, both the noncooperative and centralized models yield the same results as applying the standard DEA model to the two stages separately. As a result, the efficiency decomposition is unique. While the noncooperative approach yields a unique efficiency decomposition under multiple intermediate measures, the centralized approach is likely to yield multiple decompositions. Models are developed to test whether the efficiency decomposition arising from the centralized approach is unique. The relations among the noncooperative, centralized, and standard DEA approaches are investigated. Two real world data sets and a randomly generated data set are used to demonstrate the models and verify our findings. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

The rise and fall of counterproliferation policy

The US government initiated a Defense Counterproliferation Initiative to address the concern that, in the post-Cold War years, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons would be widespread and create a significant challenge to the US military’s combat operations. In particular, non-nuclear states might use chemical or biological warfare agents against US forces with the belief that nuclear weapons would not be used against them in retaliation. Following the events of September 11, 2001, defense strategy and policy shifted to a wider view of the threat of adversarial use of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) and the term “counterproliferation” was replaced by “combating” or “countering WMD.” Over time, the Defense Department increasingly moved away from counterproliferation principles with the detrimental effect of losing capabilities that US forces still need for contemporary adversaries. This shift has been aggravated by other US government agencies’ use of “counterproliferation” in lieu of what would have been termed “nonproliferation” activities in the 1990s. The loss of clarity within the US government on these terms has led to the inability to focus the “whole of government” on this significant national security challenge. To alleviate this challenge, the US government needs a top-down initiative to refocus policy on the distinctly different aspects of WMD with respect to military combat operations, combating terrorism, and homeland security.     

The poverty of power in military power: how collective power could benefit strategic studies

Strategic studies deals intimately with the topic of power. Most scholars in the discipline work with a concept of power as an adversarial zero-sum competition. This is natural and necessary. However, other conceptions of power developed within political science and sociology could enrich strategic studies. Approaching two typical, traditional tasks of strategy – alliance building and war-fighting – this article demonstrates the heuristic mileage of theories of collective power. In particular, we can shed new light on the post-Cold War transformation of NATO as well as state-building as a strategy in counter-insurgencies with new ideas of power. Broadening the palette of theories of power is thus valuable if strategic studies is to prosper as an independent field of study.     

Hybrid warfare through the lens of strategic theory

Hybrid warfare is the latest of the terms/concepts that have been used within the defence community in the last three decades to label contemporary warfare. It has been officially adopted in the core strategic documents of NATO, EU and national governments and has already inspired many articles, policy papers and books; however, this paper is unique in the sense that it analysis the hybrid warfare concept through the lens of strategic theory. It is argued that hybrid warfare does not merit the adoption as a doctrinal concept. Strategic theory instead, which lies at the nexus of all dimensions of warfare, provides a better viewpoint to approach contemporary warfare. It concludes that efforts should be directed towards exploring warfare under the light of eternal principles instead of proving the emergence of new types of warfare.     

基于模糊多目标对策的雷达反干扰策略优化

考虑到单部雷达反干扰效能评估指标多样化、模糊且存在不同权重的情况,在对策论基础上提出了一种雷达反干扰策略优化模型,并在考虑局中人偏好情况下,设计了一种模糊多目标对策最优混合策略求解算法,为找出较优化的雷达反干扰策略以及为战场决策提供参考。