Title: Modelling the spare parts stock levels and its applications in industrial systems

Authors: Maurizio Faccio, Alessandro Persona, Hoang Pham, Alberto Regattieri

Addresses: Department of Innovation in Mechanics and Management, University of Padua, Via Venezia 1, Padua 35131, Italy. ' Department of Management and Engineering, University of Padova, Stradella S. Nicola 3, Vicenza 36100, Italy. ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 96 Frelinghuysen Road, New Jersey, USA. ' Department of Industrial Mechanical Plants, University of Bologna, vle Risorgimento 2, Bologna 40136, Italy

Abstract: This paper addresses a practical decision making by developing an innovative inventory and transportation cost model to determine the optimum number of the spare parts and its location in the warehouses subject to run-in, random and usage failure inside a maintenance network. The spare parts slow moving items inventory management is a complex problem. The demand is sporadic and difficult to forecast, the utilisation is specific, the part economic value is high, the failure causes system downtime costs and normally this complexity is compensated by overestimated the part inventories. The proposed procedure can be used to determine the spare parts stock level and allows to minimise a function cost sum of aggregate inventory costs and downtime production plant costs caused by the parts failure and transportation from the storage areas to the user or machines failed. Four real case studies from different industrial application projects are illustrated in order to demonstrate how to apply the proposed model into real world applications. The results and findings from such industrial applications are found useful to engineers and managers in industry.

Keywords: maintenance networks; spare parts; inventory management; production system; SVM; support vector machines; BUE; bottom estimated model; MTBF; mean time between failure; stock levels; modelling; decision making; transportation costs; inventory costs; downtime.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2010.034360

International Journal of Operational Research, 2010 Vol.9 No.1, pp.39 - 64

Published online: 01 Aug 2010 *

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