A pooling strategy for flexible repair shop designs

Abstract

We discuss the design problem of a repair shop in a single echelon repairable multi-item spare parts supply system. The repair shop consists of several parallel multi-skilled servers, and storage facilities for the repaired items. The effectiveness of repair shops and the total cost of a spare part supply system depend highly on the design of repair facility and the management of inventory levels of the spare parts. In this paper, we concentrate on a design scheme known as pooling. A repair shop can be considered as a pooled structure if the spare parts can be divided into clusters such that each part type is unambiguously assigned to a single cluster (cell). Nonetheless, it is both an important and tough combinatorial optimization question to determine which type of spares to pool together. We propose a sequential solution heuristic to find the best pooled design by considering inventory allocation and capacity level designation of the repair shop. The numerical experiments show that the suggested solution approach has a reasonable algorithm run time and yields considerable cost reductions. Copyright 2018 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.