Robust inventory optimization

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Evaluation of time-varying availability in multi-echelon spare parts systems with passivation

10.1016/j.ejor.2004.06.022European Journal of Operational Research170191-105EJOR

Variance inequalities using first derivatives

We develop variance inequalities on functions of random variables using mild information such as the first derivatives. Specifically, when f and g are absolutely continuous functions, we show that Var[f(X)]

Production, Manufacturing and Logistics Evaluation of time-varying availability in multi-echelon spare parts systems with passivation

The popular models for repairable item inventory, both in the literature as well as practical applications, assume that the demands for items are independent of the number of working systems. However this assumption can introduce a serious underestimation of availability when the number of working systems is small, the failure rate is high or the repair time is long. In this paper, we study a multi-echelon repairable item inventory system under the phenomenon of passivation, i.e. serviceable items are passivated (‘‘switched off’’) upon system failure. This work is motivated by corrective maintenance of high-cost technical equipment in the miltary. We propose an efficient approximation model to compute time-varying availability. Experiments show that our analytical model agrees well with Monte Carlo simulation