Inventory control of spare parts is essential to many organizations, since excess inventory leads to high holding costs and stock outs can have a great impact on operations performance. This paper proposes a methodology for effective spare parts inventory control, motivated by a case study at a large oil refinery. Different demand modeling techniques and inventory policies are evaluated using r...

We propose tractable replenishment policies for a multi-period, single product inventory control problem under ambiguous demands, that is, only limited information of the demand distributions such as mean, support and deviation measures are available. We obtain the parameters of the tractable replenishment policies by solving a deterministic optimization problem in the form of second order cone...

Sustainability has become a major issue in most economies, causing many leading companies to focus on product recovery and reverse logistics. This research is focused on product recovery, and in particular on production control and inventory management in the remanufacturing context. We study a remanufacturing facility that receives a stream of returned products according to a Poisson process. ...

We consider a system in which a single finished good is assembled from two components. Demand for the finished product is stochastic and stationary, and procurement and assembly leadtimes are constant. Unsatisfied demand is backordered. The inventory of each component or assembly is controlled by a separate firm using a base-stock policy. Each firm is charged holding costs on its own inventory ...

We propose evaluation approaches to multi-item base-stock inventory policies where unidirectional substitutions are allowed among part types. The problems in the paper are in the context of spare parts management and we identify two substitution cases: substitution of incoming demand and substitution of backlogged demand. This leads us to three unidirectional substitution policies, for each of ...