A Greedy Heuristic for Multi-Item, Multi-Location Spare Parts Systems with Lateral Transshipments

摘要

This paper deals with the analysis of a multi-item, continuous review model of a multi-location inventory system for repairable spare parts, in which lateral and emergency shipments occur in response to stockouts. A continuous review basestock policy is assumed for the inventory control of the spare parts. The objective is to minimize the total cost for inventory holding, lateral transshipments and emergency shipments subject to a target level for the average waiting times at all locations. We structure the optimisation problem as a combinatorial problem and we develop a greedy heuristic. The greedy heuristic generates close-to-optimal solutions. The greedy heuristic constitutes a multi-item, multi-location approach. In a test bed of 600 instances, the total cost obtained under the greedy heuristic is compared to the total cost obtained by a single-item, single-location approach, which is the common approach in industry. We show that cost savings up to 45% are obtained by the use of the greedy heuristic.