An Efficient Heuristic for Pooled Repair Shop Designs

Hasan Hüseyin Turan, Shaligram Pokharel, Tarek Y. ElMekkawy, Andrei Sleptchenko, Maryam Al-Khatib

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

An effective spare part supply system planning is essential to achieve a high capital asset availability. We investigate the design problem of a repair shop in a single echelon repairable multi-item spare parts supply system. The repair shop usually consists of several servers with different skill sets. Once a failure occurs in the system, the failed part is queued to be served by a suitable server that has the required skill. We model the repair shop as a collection of independent sub-systems, where each sub-system is responsible for repairing certain types of failed parts. The procedure of partitioning a repair shop into sub-systems is known as pooling, and the repair shop formed by the union of independent sub-systems is called a pooled repair shop. Identifying the best partition is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem. In this direction, we formulate the problem as a stochastic nonlinear integer programming model and propose a sequential solution heuristic to find the best-pooled design by considering inventory allocation and capacity level designation of the repair shop. We conduct numerical experiments to quantify the value of the pooled repair shop designs. Our analysis shows that pooled designs can yield cost reductions by 25% to 45% compared to full flexible and dedicated designs. The proposed heuristic also achieves a lower average total system cost than that generated by a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based solution algorithm.

Original languageBritish English
Title of host publicationOperations Research and Enterprise Systems - 7th International Conference, ICORES 2018, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsGreg H. Parlier, Federico Liberatore, Marc Demange
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages102-118
Number of pages17
ISBN (Print)9783030160340
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Event7th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems, ICORES 2018 - Funchal, Portugal
Duration: 24 Jan 201826 Jan 2018

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
Volume966
ISSN (Print)1865-0929

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems, ICORES 2018
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityFunchal
Period24/01/1826/01/18

Keywords

  • Genetic algorithm
  • Heuristic
  • Pooling
  • Repair shop
  • Spare part logistics

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