NATO war medical doctrine was applied in the war in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, due to rather specific martial and organizational circumstances, the doctrine had to be modified. sometimes substantially. A medical team from the war hospital in Livno, Bosnia and Herzegovina describes their work with respect to the four-echelon NATO doctrine. The team covered a relatively large and a...

University. One of my reasons for choosing RAND rather than a more conventional academic appointment was my desire to be involved in applied rather than abstract mathematics. I could not have selected a better location to achieve this particular goal. George Dantzig had arrived recently and was in the process of applying linear programming techniques to a growing body of basic problems. Richard...

In many multi-echelon inventory systems, the lead times are random variables. A common and reasonable assumption in most models is that replenishment orders do not cross, which implies that successive lead times are correlated. However, the process that generates such lead times is usually not well defined, which is especially a problem for simulation modeling. In this paper, we use results fro...

A central question in supply chain management is how to coordinate activities and inventories over a large number of stages and locations, while providing a high level of service to end customers. One theoretically and practically important methodology for addressing this problem is the guaranteed service (GS) framework, in which the stages of the supply chain operate according to base stock po...

In this paper, we consider a supply chain model consisting of a single product, one supplier and multiple retailers. Demand at the retailers is random, but stationary. Each retailer places her orders to the supplier according to the well known (Q,R) policy. We assume that the supplier has on-line information about the demand as well as inventory activities of the product at each retailer and em...

We show the optimality of state dependent echelon base stock policies in uncapacitated serial inventory systems with Markov modulated demand and Markov modulated stochastic leadtimes in the absence of order crossing. Our results cover finite time horizon problems as well as infinite time horizon formulations, with either a discounted or an average cost criterion. We employ a novel approach, bas...