Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2006

Abstract

The popular models for repairable item inventory, both in the literature as well as practical applications, assume that the demands for items are independent of the number of working systems. However this assumption can introduce a serious underestimation of availability when the number of working systems is small, the failure rate is high or the repair time is long. In this paper, we study a multi-echelon repairable item inventory system under the phenomenon of passivation, i.e. serviceable items are passivated (“switched off”) upon system failure. This work is motivated by corrective maintenance of high-cost technical equipment in the miltary. We propose an efficient approximation model to compute time-varying availability. Experiments show that our analytical model agrees well with Monte Carlo simulation.

Keywords

Inventory, Maintenance, Multi-echelon, Passivation

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Publication

European Journal of Operations Research

Volume

170

Issue

1

First Page

91

Last Page

105

ISSN

0377-2217

Identifier

10.1016/j.ejor.2004.06.022

Publisher

Elsevier

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2004.06.022

Share

COinS