Determining the number of spares in an inventory/repair system which supports equipment with scheduled usage

Autor: Michael S. Bridgman, Clark A. Mount-Campbell
Rok vydání: 1993
Předmět:
Zdroj: International Journal of Production Economics. :501-518
ISSN: 0925-5273
DOI: 10.1016/0925-5273(93)90116-3
Popis: We address the problem of finding the minimum number of spares for systems of equipment which are used on a scheduled, periodic basis. When spares are expensive it is important to have as few spares in the system as possible subject to management's specification of the required likelihood of having equipment available for use when needed. Several varieties of this problem are addressed in the literature, but all of them assume the equipment is needed or must be available all the time rather than according to a schedule. We present the base case of a series of stochastic models that can address several versions of this problem and which explicitly address the aspect of scheduled usage. Numerical examples based on NASA's space shuttle are presented. A comparison is made between the results of our model and an approach in the literature that is in common use. The comparison shows that the usual approach errors on the side of too many spares in the system.
Databáze: OpenAIRE