Operational Spare Parts Planning in Service Control Towers

Engin Topan, University of Twente

Abstract

The talk will be a summary of two papers. In the first paper, we provide an overview of operational spare parts planning in service control towers. Here, we conduct company surveys to identify the issues, the challenges, and the needs in practice. We propose a classification framework to reveal the key aspects of operational planning decisions, and to provide an overview of the scientific literature. We identify promising research directions. In the second paper, we investigate a operational spare parts planning problem in a multi-item two-echelon distribution system, taking into account real-time supply information in the system. We consider a broad range of operational interventions, either reactive (to solve a shortage) or proactive (to avoid a shortage). We propose an integrated approach to determine the optimal timing and size of each intervention type to minimize the total downtime and shipment costs associated with interventions. Data from a leading original equipment manufacturer of high-tech systems is used to test the performance of our approach. We find that our integrated approach reduces total downtime considerably with a very limited increase in total shipment costs. Proactive emergency shipments contribute most to downtime reduction. The benefit of our approach is higher for high demand parts. Our approach is efficient enough to solve practical size problems. We also test the performance of a greedy heuristic, well-known approach in the literature. We find that the gap between the heuristic and the optimal solution is relatively large.

Short Bio

Engin Topan is an assistant professor of reliability, maintenance, and service logistics in Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems department at University of Twente. He received his BSc, MSc, and Ph.D. from Middle East Technical University in 2002, 2005, and 2010, respectively. He worked as a researcher and instructor at Cankaya University, Turkish Military Academy in 2002-2012, and Eindhoven University of Technology between in 2012-2016 and he has been working at University of Twente since then. He is involved in research projects on proactive after-sales service logistics for capital goods (ProSeLo, ProSeLoNext) and proactive maintenance planning (MANTIS). His current research interests lie in predicting, planning, and scheduling for service control towers in after-sales service logistics, as well as in flexible and proactive production and supply planning and scheduling for smart industry with a particular focus on SME+s.

Venue

Friday, December 24, 2021, 4.00 pm - Zoom Meeting