IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/oropre/v45y1997i4p577-583.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Little's Result Approach to the Service Constrained Spares Provisioning Problem for Repairable Items

Author

Listed:
  • Nadim E. Abboud

    (American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon)

  • John N. Daigle

    (University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi)

Abstract

A set of identical machines are deployed to meet a known and constant demand. If a machine fails, a replacement part must be available before repair of the machine may be initiated. If the part is currently out of stock, it must be ordered. Once repaired at one of a finite number of repair stations, the machine serves as an “operational ready” standby if demand is currently being met; otherwise, the machine is immediately deployed. Machine time-to-failure, ordering leadtimes, and repair times are all assumed to be exponentially distributed. The objective is to determine the number of machines and repair channels that minimize a cost function subject to the service constraint; i.e., on average, the number of machines operating should be at least some fraction of the demand. We present an algorithm that efficiently generates all the boundary points of the feasible region, from which the optimal solution is readily identified, for the special cases in which there is either zero or infinite stock. Use of the algorithm, which is based upon Little's result and first-passage time analysis, requires negligible storage and computational effort. In fact, for problems of moderate size, computation of optimal solutions via a nonprogrammable pocket calculator is feasible.

Suggested Citation

  • Nadim E. Abboud & John N. Daigle, 1997. "A Little's Result Approach to the Service Constrained Spares Provisioning Problem for Repairable Items," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 45(4), pages 577-583, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:45:y:1997:i:4:p:577-583
    DOI: 10.1287/opre.45.4.577
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.45.4.577
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/opre.45.4.577?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nowicki, David R. & Randall, Wesley S. & Ramirez-Marquez, Jose Emmanuel, 2012. "Improving the computational efficiency of metric-based spares algorithms," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 219(2), pages 324-334.
    2. D Nowicki & U D Kumar & H J Steudel & D Verma, 2008. "Spares provisioning under performance-based logistics contract: profit-centric approach," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 59(3), pages 342-352, March.
    3. Muhammad El-Taha & Bacel Maddah, 2006. "Allocation of Service Time in a Multiserver System," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(4), pages 623-637, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:45:y:1997:i:4:p:577-583. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.