Evaluating the Impact of Spare Parts Pooling Strategy on the Maintenance of Unreliable Repairable Systems

Abstract

In today's industries, optimal spare parts provisioning plays a critical role towards sustaining the asset's operational capabilities. In this context, spare parts pooling is increasingly mentioned as a plausible approach for optimizing spare parts management, more so for repairable systems. In this sense, several frameworks are proposed in literature, though largely analytical, thus limiting their capabilities with respect to modeling complex repairable systems. Moreover, the nature of interactions often account for aspects such as system reliability, imperfect component reconditioning, repair capacity and spare parts inventory that is multi-echelon in nature. To realistically model such complexities, simulation approaches are often explored. This paper presents a discrete event simulation modeling study. The simulation model mimics the impact of several aspects on unreliable repairable systems. The aspects include the repair capacity, component reconditioning process, and multi-echelon spare part provisioning strategy. Moreover, the influence of spare parts quality aspects is evaluated and demonstrated in the case study of critical system for a thermal power plant.