Publication: Joint inventory and scheduling control in a repair facility
Program
School / College / Institute
College of Administrative Sciences and Economics
KU-Authors
KU Authors
Co-Authors
van Houtum, Geert-Jan
Publication Date
Language
Type
Embargo Status
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Alternative Title
Abstract
We study inventory and repair scheduling decisions of a maintenance service provider for repairable capital goods. Because of high downtime costs, the service provider keeps spare parts on stock to replace broken parts quickly. The service provider should determine the inventory level of spare parts for each component and the repair scheduling policy. Furthermore, in case of a stock-out, the service provider should decide whether to back-order the demand or execute an emergency repair, which is an urgent but expensive repair operation for a broken part followed by a fast form of installation. The objective is to minimize the long-run average inventory holding, back-order, and emergency repair costs. We formulate the repairable network as a closed queueing system and consider an asymptotic regime in which the repair facility is in the conventional heavy-traffic regime. Then, we formulate and solve a Brownian control problem (BCP). From the optimal BCP solution, we derive a simple and intuitive decision rule stating if the emergency repairs are necessary to achieve a close-to-optimal system performance. Moreover, we propose a simple, intuitive, and easy-to-implement heuristic control policy and demonstrate its close-to-optimal performance via numerical experiments.
Source
Publisher
Informs
Subject
Management, Operations research, Management science
Citation
Has Part
Source
Operations Research
Book Series Title
Edition
DOI
10.1287/opre.2023.2459