Urban infrastructures are the focus of terrorist acts because, quite simply, they produce the most visible impact, if not casualties. While terrorist acts are the most insidious and onerous of all disruptions, it is obvious that there are many similarities to the way one should deal with these willful acts and those caused by natural and accidental incidents that have also resulted in adverse and severe consequences. However, there is one major and critical difference between terrorist acts and the other types of disruptions: the terrorist acts are willful — and therefore also adaptive, if not coordinated. One must counter these acts with the same, if not more sophisticated, willful, adaptive and informed approach. Real-time, information-based decision making — which Tien (2003) has called the decision informatics paradigm — is the approach advanced herein to help make the right decisions at the various stages of a disruption. It is focused on decisions and based on multiple data sources, data fusion and analysis methods, timely information, stochastic decision models and a systems engineering outlook; moreover, it is multidisciplinary, evolutionary and systemic in practice. The approach provides a consistent way to address real-time emergency issues, including those concerned with the preparation for a major disruption, the prediction of such a disruption, the prevention or mitigation of the disruption, the detection of the disruption, the response to the disruption, and the recovery steps that are necessary to adequately, if not fully, recuperate from the disruption. The efforts of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security and its academically-based Homeland Security Centers of Excellence are considered within the proposed types, stages and decisions framework.

For many real world problems, when the design space is huge and unstructured, and time consuming simulation is needed to estimate the performance measure, it is important to decide how many designs to sample and how long to run for each design alternative given that we have only a fixed amount of computing time. In this paper, we present a simulation study on how the distribution of the performance measures and distribution of the estimation errors/noises will affect the decision. From the analysis, it is observed that when the underlying distribution of the noise is bounded and if there is a high chance that we can get the smallest noise, then the decision will be to sample as many as possible, but if the noise is unbounded, then it will be important to reduce the noise level first by assigning more replications for each design. On the other hand, if the distribution of the performance measure indicates that we will have a high chance of getting good designs, the suggestion is also to reduce the noise level, otherwise, we need to sample more designs so as to increase the chances of getting good designs. For the special case when the distributions of both the performance measures and noise are normal, we are able to estimate the number of designs to sample, and the number of replications to run in order to obtain the best performance.

A comparison of two decision analysis tools for the analysis of strategic conflicts, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) and the graph model for conflict resolution, is carried out by applying them to the China-US TV dumping conflict. Firstly, the graph model is introduced along with practical procedures for modeling and analyzing conflicts using the decision support software, GMCR II. Next, ANP is explained, emphasizing structural features and procedures for synthesizing priorities. Then a framework for employing ANP to analyze strategic conflicts is designed and used to compare ANP to the graph model. The case study of the China-US TV dumping conflict provides a basis for the graph model and ANP to be compared; different features of the approaches are highlighted. The study shows that because of different theoretical backgrounds, ANP and the graph model for conflict analysis both provide useful information which can be combined to furnish a better understanding of a strategic conflict.

In this paper, we reported the benefits of using eXtended Markup Language (XML) to support financial knowledge management and discussed number of issues associated with developing an XML-based financial knowledge management system. Current searching engines do not provide sufficient performance in terms of recall, precision, and extensibility for financial knowledge management, because the data represented in HTML format cannot support financial knowledge management effectively. On the other hand, XML provides a vendor-neutral approach to structure and organize contents as XML authors are allowed to create arbitrary tags to describe the format or structure of data. A prototype of XML-based ELectronic Financial Filing System (ELFFS-XML) is developed, and value-added services such as automatic tag generation and cross-linking related information from different data sources are provided to enable knowledge representation and knowledge generation. We compared the XML-based ELFFS with the original HTML-based ELFFS and SEDAR — an electronic filing system used in Canada, and we found that ELFFS-XML is able to provide much more functionalities to support knowledge management. We also compared our automatic tag generation result with the experts’ and investors’ choices, and recommended some directions for future development of similar electronic filing systems.

Bottlenecks, the key ingredients for improving the performances of the production networks, have been profoundly studied during the last decade. Yet, because of the complexity of the research results, there is still a significant gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we review various bottleneck definitions, detection methods and the asymptotic results and provide a practical guidance for recognizing and utilizing the bottlenecks in production networks. Queueing theory works as the mathematical foundation in our study. Various definitions of the bottlenecks are classified as either Performance in Processing (PIP) based or sensitivity based definitions, which reflect the preferences of the managers. Detection methods are surveyed closely based on the definitions. These methods are used to recognize the bottlenecks and to provide diagnosis results to managers. Comparisons show that different detection methods may lead to vastly different conclusions. The recognition of the bottlenecks has another advantage: the ultimate phenomena of the bottlenecks can greatly reduce the computation complexity in calculating the system performances. Bottlenecks based approximation and asymptotic results are studied to exhibit the contribution of bottlenecks in performance estimation and theoretical analysis.

Previous work on the exposure of equity markets to exchange rate risk, surprisingly, found stock returns were not significantly affected by exchange rate fluctuations. In this paper, we examine the relation between China, Japan and USA MSCI (Morgan & Stanley Capital International) daily equity index returns and SAFE (State Administration of Foreign Exchange) exchange rate returns of Chinese RMB and Japanese Yen in US dollar. We find a significant relation between Asian foreign equity stock returns and Chinese RMB and Japanese Yen exchange rate returns. This article incorporates foreign exchange values as partial determinants of Asian foreign equity market returns and suggests that currency risk is of hedging concern to investors with implications for portfolio management. We implement our result in portfolio’s CaR determination under VaR constraints.