Reliability Engineering and Services

10Repairable Inventory System

10.1 Introduction

Repairable inventory theory deals with modeling and design of stocking systems for service or spare parts that can be repaired and reused rather than discarded. It is part of the closed‐loop supply chain management that involves product recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse for environmental sustainability. A typical question is to determine the inventory level and/or the stock locations subject to performance criteria or resource constraint. An added complication to the problem is to determine the capacity or location for carrying out the repair job. Performance measures include backorders, inventory cost, repair time, stockout probability, and system availability. Various solution techniques have been developed to solve this type of problems, ranging from deterministic and stochastic programing to Markov chain and queuing networks. In this chapter we introduce basic models for managing repairable inventory systems. Section 10.2 discusses the inventory performance measures at item and system levels. Sections 10.3–10.5 focus on the design and analysis of single echelon systems with uncapacitated and capacitated repair, and infinite and finite fleet size. Section 10.6 investigates a single‐echelon system that offers both regular and emergency repairs. Section 10.7 designs multiresolution inventory systems to handle non‐stationary demand. Section 10.8 illustrates the principle of the classical multi‐echelon model, i.e. the multi‐echelon ...