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In recent works in manpower planning interest has been awakened in modeling manpower systems in departmentalized framework. This, as a form of disaggregation, may solve the problem of observable heterogeneity but not latent heterogeneity; it rather opens up other aspects of latent heterogeneity hitherto unaccounted for in classical (non departmentalized) manpower models. In this article, a multinomial Markov-switching model is formulated for investigating latent heterogeneity in intra-departmental and interdepartmental transitions in departmentalized manpower systems. The formulation incorporates extensions of the mover-stayer principle resulting in several competing models. The best manpower model is chosen based on the optimum number of hidden states established by the use of Expectation-Maximization iterative algorithm for estimation of the model parameters and a search procedure for assessing model performance against one another. The illustration establishes the usefulness of the model formulation in highlighting hidden disparities in personnel transitions in a departmentalized manpower system and in avoiding wrong model specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, 91 different tests for exponentiality are reviewed. Some of the tests are universally consistent while others are against some special classes of life distributions. Power performances of 40 of these different tests for exponentiality of datasets are compared through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The comparisons are conducted for different sample sizes of 10, 25, 50 and 100 for different groups of distributions according to the shape of their hazard functions at 5 percent level of significance. Also, the techniques are applied to two real-world datasets and a measure of power is employed for the comparison of the tests. The results show that some tests which are very good under one group of alternative distributions are not so under another group. Also, some tests maintained relatively high power over all the groups of alternative distributions studied while some others maintained poor power performances over all the groups of alternative distributions. Again, the result obtained from real-world datasets agree completely with those of the simulation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]