Title: Cannibalisation in a repair/replacement inventory system

Authors: Michael Dreyfuss; Alan Stulman

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Jerusalem College of Technology, Jerusalem, 91160, Israel ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Jerusalem College of Technology, Jerusalem, 91160, Israel

Abstract: In this paper we consider policies for cannibalisation in a repair/replacement inventory system where our focus will be the waiting time of a customer in the repair queue. The cannibalisation policy will be affected most by the time required to effect the cannibalisation and specifically the time required in disassembling the functioning components from the newly arrived customer. The problem we wish to address is when cannibalisation should be carried out when the environment is too complex for an analytic result. We examine two heuristic approaches, which may give good results. We will first present a heuristic policy which is calculation intensive and a second heuristic which will require far less calculations at each decision point in time. These heuristics, and a comparison between them, will be examined with the aid of simulation.

Keywords: cannibalisation; waiting time; heuristic; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2019.102212

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2019 Vol.34 No.2, pp.139 - 153

Received: 12 May 2017
Accepted: 08 Feb 2018
Published online: 11 Sep 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article