Book reviews

Red Banner: the Soviet Military System in Peace and War. By Christopher Donnelly. Jane's Information Group, Coulsdon, UK (1988), 288 pp., £35.00

Images of T. E. Lawrence. By S. E. Tabachnick and C. Matheson. Jonathan Cape, London (1988); The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. Edited by Malcolm Brown. Dent, London (1988); T. E. Lawrence. By J. Wilson. National Portrait Gallery Publications, London (1988); Lawrence and the Arab Revolts. By D. Nicolle. Osprey, London (1989)

Liddell Hart and the Weight of History. By John Mearsheimer. Brassey's, London (1989), £15.95

Science and Mythology in the Making of Defence Policy. Edited by Margaret Blunden and Owen Greene. Brassey's, London (1989), £27.50/$44.00

Warfare in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Colin McInnes and G. D. Sheffield. Unwin Hyman, London (1988), 239 pp., £25.00     

On finding spanning eulerian subgraphs

In this article, we examine the problem of producing a spanning Eulerian subgraph in an undirected graph. After the ?-completeness of the general problem is established, we present polynomial-time algorithms for both the maximization and minimization versions where instances are defined on a restricted class of graphs referred to as series-parallel. Some novelties in the minimization case are discussed, as are heuristic ideas.     

Landmarks in defense literature

Tom Wintringham: New Ways of War (1940), People's War (1942) and Weapons and Tactics (1943)     

Approximation for the departure process of a queue in a network

A simple renewal process is identified to approximate the complex departure process of a queue often found in queueing network models. The arrival process to the queue is the superposition or merging of several independent component-renewal processes that are approximations of departure processes from other queues and external arrival processes; there is a single server with exponential service times, and the waiting space is infinite. The departure process of this queue is of interest because it is the arrival process to other queues in the network. The approximation proposed is a hybrid; the mean and variance of the approximating departure intervals is a weighted average of those determined by basic methods in Whitt [41] with the weighting function empirically determined using simulation. Tandem queueing systems with superposition arrival processes and exponential service times are used to evaluate the approximation. The departure process of the first queue in the tandem is approximated by a renewal process, the tandem system is replaced by two independent queues, and the second queue is solved analytically. When compared to simulation estimates, the average absolute error in hybrid approximations of the expected number in the second queue is 6%, a significant improvement over 22–41% in the basic methods.     

Minimizing mean absolute deviation of completion times about a common due date

We consider a single machine scheduling problem in which the objective is to minimize the mean absolute deviation of job completion times about a common due date. We present an algorithm for determining multiple optimal schedules under restrictive assumptions about the due date, and an implicit enumeration procedure when the assumptions do not hold. We also establish the similarity of this problem to the two parallel machines mean flow time problem.