Social Media, Gender and the Mediatisation of War: Exploring the German Armed Forces’ Visual Representation of the Afghanistan Operation on Facebook

Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. The article examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the German armed forces’ official Facebook page. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the frame of visibility and what remains out of its view

MRP II-Based Production Management Using Intelligent Decision Making

An extended MRP II-based production management system (PMS) is presented, which improves the traditional MRP II paradigm. It does so by attaching an intelligent decision supporting system (IDSS) to the lowest level of the PMS, namely the production activity control (PAC) subsystem. The IDSS includes a simulator, that imitates real system behaviour, a knowledge-based component, that imitates expert reasoning, and a real-time database manager, that acts as the data pool and the communication gate between them. It is capable of performing off-line and on-line rescheduling, thus resulting in more realistic short-term production schedules. Analysis of the related case problem and implementation of the system are also discussed

Reactive Scheduling Systems

In most practical environments, scheduling is an ongoing reactive process where evolving and changing circumstances continually force reconsideration and revision of pre-established plans. Scheduling research has traditionally ignored this "process view" of the problem, focusing instead on optimization of performance under idealized assumptions of environmental stability and solution executability. In this paper, we present work aimed at the development of reactive scheduling systems, which approach scheduling as a problem of maintaining a prescriptive solution over time, and emphasize objectives (e.g., solution continuity, system responsiveness) which relate directly to effective development and use of schedules in dynamic environments. We describe OPIS, a scheduling system designed to incrementally revise schedules in response to changes to solution constraints. OPIS implements a constraint-directed approach to reactive scheduling. Constraint analysis is used to prioritize outstandin..