Title
Using repair priorities to reduce stock investment in spare part networks
Abstract
In this paper, we examine the impact of repair priorities in spare part networks. Several heuristics for assigning priorities to items as well as optimising stock levels are developed, extending the well-known VARI-METRIC method. We model repair shops by multi-class, multi-server priority queues. A proper priority setting may lead to a significant reduction in the inventory investment required to attain a target system availability (usually 10–20%). The saving opportunities are particularly high if the utilisation of the repair shops is high and if the item types sharing the same repair shop have clearly different characteristics (price, repair time). For example, we find an investment reduction of 73% for a system with single server repair shops with an utilisation of 0.90 that handle five different item types.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1016/j.ejor.2004.02.002
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Inventory,Queuing,Spare parts
Spare part,Inversion (meteorology),Queue,Inventory control,Queueing theory,Priority queue,Heuristics,Inventory investment,Mathematics,Operations management
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
163
3
0377-2217
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
16
1.19
3
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrei Sleptchenko18310.64
M. C. Van Der Heijden212011.58
Aart Van Harten31007.93