We address a problem of inventory management of spare parts in the context of a large energy company, producer of oil and gas. Spare parts are critical for assuring operational conditions in offshore platforms. About 200,000 different items are held in several inventory plants. The inventory system implemented at the company corresponds to a min-max system. The control parameters are decided ba...

In this paper, we resort to Monte Carlo simulation for achieving a realistic modelling of the dynamics of a system supported by spare parts. The spare dynamics, namely the start-up of a spare unit upon failure of an on line unit, is caught by means of the multi-state correlation method previously introduced by some of the present authors to describe stand-by and load-share dependencies. The Mon...

We consider a stock point for expensive, low-usage items that is operated by multiple decision makers. Each faces a Poisson demand process, and the joint stock point is controlled by a continuous-review base stock policy with full backordering. We consider penalty costs for backorders and holding costs for stock on hand. For this model, we derive structural properties of the resulting cost func...

We study spare parts inventory control for a repair shop for aircraft components. Defect components that are removed from the aircraft are sent to such a shop for repair. Only after the component has been inspected does it become clear which specific spare parts are needed to repair it, and in what quantity they are needed. Market requirements for shop performance are reflected in fill rate req...

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM’s) of advanced capital goods often offer service contracts for system support to their customers, for which spare parts are needed. Due to technological changes, suppliers of spare parts may stop production at some point in time. As a reaction to that decision, an OEM may place a so-called Last Time Buy (LTB) order to cover demand for spare parts during the...

With deregulation, utilities in the electric power sector face a much more urgent imperative to emphasize cost efficiencies as compared to the days of regulation. One major opportunity for cost savings is through reductions in spare parts inventory. Most utilities are used to carrying large volumes of expensive, relatively slow-moving units because of a high degree of risk-averseness. In this p...

This work aims for image categorization by learning a representation of discriminative parts. Different from most existing part-based methods, we argue that parts are naturally shared between image categories and should be modeled as such. We motivate our approach with a quantitative and qualitative analysis by backtracking where selected parts come from. Our analysis shows that in addition to ...

In the classical approach to determine how many spare parts to stock, the spare parts shortage costs or the minimum fill rate are a key factor. A difficulty with this approach lies in the estimation of these shortage costs or the determination of appropriate minimum fill rates. In an attempt to overcome this problem, we propose to use the data gathered in reliability centered maintenance studie...

There is a consensus that conventional continuous demand distribution methods are not appropriate for forecasting replacement parts. However, many forecasting tools available in market still use them. This work presents an application of the Poisson distribution to forecast the needs of electronic spare parts. Using basic stock management notions and usual concepts of reliability, availability ...

In this paper, we consider a repair shop that fixes failed components from different k-out-of-n:G systems. We assume that each system consists of the same type of component; to increase availability, a certain number of critical components are stocked as spare parts. We permit a shared inventory serving all systems and/or reserved inventories for each system; we call this a hybrid model. Additi...