Showing papers by "Thomas R. Sexton published in 1985"

Optimizing Single Vehicle Many-to-Many Operations with Desired Delivery Times: I. Scheduling

Abstract: A set of n customers is given. Each customer has a desired point of pickup, a desired point of delivery and a desired time of delivery. The problem is to determine the order of pickup and delivery and the times of pickup and delivery of these n customers by a single vehicle in order to minimize total customer inconvenience. Here, a mathematical programming formulating of this problem is subjected to Benders' decomposition procedure. The result is a heuristic routing and scheduling algorithm which is shown to produce high quality solutions in reasonable computation time by testing on moderately sized real data bases from both Gaithers-burg, Maryland, and Baltimore, Maryland. This study is divided into two parts, the first detailing the scheduling analysis and the second focusing on the routing component.

Game tree analysis of international crises

Abstract: Conflicts among nations can often be understood as games in which players (nations) possessing strategies (the sets of actions they may take) face alternative consequences (loss or gain of territory or prestige) determined by their choices of action. Amenable to this type of analysis is the recent Falkland Islands crisis involving Argentina and Great Britain. The events in this case provide an illustration of the way “three-stage, two-person sequential game tree models” can explain the outcome of a crisis situation, whether the parties involved possess perfect information regarding the likely actions of their opponents or are subject to misperceptions about them. When misperceptions occur, the effects can be severely detrimental to both players. Under certain conditions a single misperception by a player of an opponent's preferences can lead to conflict even though both players would have preferred another outcome, one that would in fact have resulted if the error in perception had not occurred. Thus, the outcome of such a “game” is highly sensitive not only to the players' actual preferences but to mutual perceptions of those preferences.