A branch‐and‐cut algorithm for the quay crane scheduling problem in a container terminal

The quay crane scheduling problem consists of determining a sequence of unloading and loading movements for cranes assigned to a vessel in order to minimize the vessel completion time as well as the crane idle times. Idle times originate from interferences between cranes since these roll on the same rails and a minimum safety distance must be maintained between them. The productivity of container terminals is often measured in terms of the time necessary to load and unload vessels by quay cranes, which are the most important and expensive equipment used in ports. We formulate the quay crane scheduling problem as a vehicle routing problem with side constraints, including precedence relationships between vertices. For small size instances our formulation can be solved by CPLEX. For larger ones we have developed a branch‐and‐cut algorithm incorporating several families of valid inequalities, which exploit the precedence constraints between vertices. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006     

“Made in China”: an emerging brand in the global arms market

Possession of a brand is a sine qua non for economic success, not least because it connotes trust in delivering the value promised. Although Western arms exporters offer branded systems whose sales are influenced by price, there is a plethora of other economic variables, such as offset requirements and life-cycle support. Entrants to the international arms market will struggle without such arms “packages.” China’s entry, however, goes beyond the traditional economic paradigm. A four-stage historical model offers the backdrop for identifying the drivers that have forged its market entry into 55 countries worldwide. The strategy initially focused on sales of rudimentary military equipment for political purposes, but recently it has begun to commercialize exports, repositioning them from a low- to a high-tech sales trajectory. A Sino “brand” is thus emerging, reflecting both competitiveness and diplomatic considerations, especially non-interference in client state domestic affairs.     

The underlying causes of military outsourcing in the USA and UK: bridging the persistent gap between ends,ways and means since the beginning of the Cold War

This article reappraises the two most-studied country cases of military outsourcing: the USA and the UK. It argues that the contemporary wave of military contracting stretches back to the beginning of the cold war and not only to the demobilisation of armies in the 1990s or the neoliberal reforms introduced since the 1980s. It traces the political, technological and ideational developments that laid the groundwork for these reforms and practices since the early cold war and account for its endurance today. Importantly, it argues that a persistent gap between strategic objectives and resources, i.e. the challenge to reconcile ends and means, is an underlying driver of military contracting in both countries. Contemporary contracting is thus most closely tied to military support functions in support of wider foreign and defence political objectives. Security services in either state may not have been outsourced so swiftly, if at all, without decades of experience in outsourcing military logistics functions and the resultant vehicles, processes and familiarities with public-private partnerships. The article thus provides a wider and deeper understanding of the drivers of contractualisation, thereby improving our understanding of both its historical trajectory and the determinants of its present and potential futures.     

美军采办项目的采办策略分析

采办策略是美军针对具体采办项目强制规定的覆盖整个项目寿命周期的纲领性文件,对于保障在资源限制条件下达成项目采办目标具有重要的意义。本文首先分析了采办策略的概念,随后研究了采办策略的主要内容、与采办管理周期的匹配要求,最后提出了对我军装备采办改革的启示。     

美军无人机集群项目发展

近几年来,无人机集群技术在美军多个方面的推动下,引起了全世界的热切关注。文章简要总结了美军无人机集群发展现状,梳理了美军开展无人机集群技术的初衷,并分析认为美军数量型无人机集群发展战略不完全适用于现阶段我军军情。文中给出了我国现阶段发展无人机集群的思路,这对全面认识无人机集群的优势、明晰我军无人机集群技术发展方向具有一定的参考价值。     

增强军校本科学员指挥谋略能力研究——基于计算机兵棋系统

对指挥谋略进行概念分析,确定基于计算机兵棋系统的指挥谋略训练内容;明确计算机兵棋推演的一般步骤和注意事项;以联军2004年11月"破晓"行动为例运用计算机兵棋系统进行指挥谋略训练。研究表明,基于计算机兵棋系统运用战例研究可以成为增强军校本科学员指挥谋略的训练模式。     

分布式计算环境下的栅格数据存储策略

针对传统的栅格数据存储策略不能满足分布式计算环境下粗粒度数据访问需求,应对海量栅格数据计算时效率低下的问题,结合分布式文件系统的存储特点,同时考虑地图代数算子在Map/Reduce阶段以栅格瓦片为单位的计算特点,提出一种基于Hadoop分布式文件系统的栅格瓦片存储策略。围绕栅格数据瓦片分割、压缩瓦片数据组织与存储、分布式文件输入输出接口改进等方面对该存储策略加以实现,并使用基于该存储策略的地图代数局部算子的分布式计算流程加以验证。理论分析与实验结果表明,该策略能够显著提高分布式计算环境下空间分析算子的运算速度。     

Flexible capacity strategy in an asymmetric oligopoly market with competition and demand uncertainty

This article studies flexible capacity strategy (FCS) under oligopoly competition with uncertain demand. Each firm utilizes either the FCS or inflexible capacity strategy (IFCS). Flexible firms can postpone their productions until observing the actual demand, whereas inflexible firms cannot. We formulate a new asymmetrical oligopoly model for the problem, and obtain capacity and production decisions of the firms at Nash equilibrium. It is interesting to verify that cross‐group competition determines the capacity allocation between the two groups of firms, while intergroup competition determines the market share within each group. Moreover, we show that the two strategies coexist among firms only when cost differentiation is medium. Counterintuitively, flexible firms benefit from increasing production cost when the inflexible competition intensity is sufficiently high. This is because of retreat of inflexible firms, flexibility effect, and the corresponding high price. We identify conditions under which FCS is superior than IFCS. We also demonstrate that flexible firms benefit from increasing demand uncertainty. However, when demand variance is not very large, flexible firms may be disadvantaged. We further investigate the effects of cross‐group and intergroup competition on individual performance of the firms. We show that as flexible competition intensity increases, inflexible firms are mainly affected by the cross‐group competition first and then by the intergroup competition, whereas flexible firms are mainly affected by the intergroup competition. Finally, we examine endogenous flexibility and identify its three drivers: cost parameters, cross‐group competition, and intergroup competition. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 117–138, 2017     

Determining optimal sizes of bounded batches with rejection via quadratic min‐cost flow

In this article, we consider a single machine scheduling problem, in which identical jobs are split into batches of bounded sizes. For each batch, it is allowed to produce less jobs than a given upper bound, that is, some jobs in a batch can be rejected, in which case a penalty is paid for each rejected job. The objective function is the sum of several components, including the sum of the completion times, total delivery cost, and total rejection cost. We reduce this problem to a min‐cost flow problem with a convex quadratic function and adapt Tamir's algorithm for its solution. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 217–224, 2017     

Optimizing usage and maintenance decisions for k‐out‐of‐n systems of moving assets

We consider an integrated usage and maintenance optimization problem for a k‐out‐of‐n system pertaining to a moving asset. The k‐out‐of‐n systems are commonly utilized in practice to increase availability, where n denotes the total number of parallel and identical units and k the number of units required to be active for a functional system. Moving assets such as aircraft, ships, and submarines are subject to different operating modes. Operating modes can dictate not only the number of system units that are needed to be active, but also where the moving asset physically is, and under which environmental conditions it operates. We use the intrinsic age concept to model the degradation process. The intrinsic age is analogous to an intrinsic clock which ticks on a different pace in different operating modes. In our problem setting, the number of active units, degradation rates of active and standby units, maintenance costs, and type of economic dependencies are functions of operating modes. In each operating mode, the decision maker should decide on the set of units to activate (usage decision) and the set of units to maintain (maintenance decision). Since the degradation rate differs for active and standby units, the units to be maintained depend on the units that have been activated, and vice versa. In order to minimize maintenance costs, usage and maintenance decisions should be jointly optimized. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process and provide some structural properties of the optimal policy. Moreover, we assess the performance of usage policies that are commonly implemented for maritime systems. We show that the cost increase resulting from these policies is up to 27% for realistic settings. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the cases in which joint usage and maintenance optimization is more valuable. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 418–434, 2017