Control of a repair and overhaul system with probabilistic parts availability

Abstract

We consider the control of a remanufacturing system executing capital assets repair and remanufacturing in a single system. It is assumed that the production system responds to planned demand at the end of the expected life cycle of each individual piece of equipment and unplanned demand triggered by a major equipment failure. The difficulty of controlling this type of production resides in the variable nature of the remanufacturing process, the possibility of using different replacement and repair strategies, and the probabilistic availability of spare parts. We formulate this problem as a multi-level control policy based on inventory thresholds triggering the use of different execution modes and propose a suboptimal policy. Determination of the control policy parameters is based on parameter optimisation of analytical expressions and a simulation approach was used to validate our analytical results. Hence, we show that we can provide a feasible control policy for repair and overhaul systems under probabilistic replacement parts availability.

Keywords:

• optimal control
• repair
• overhaul
• remanufacturing
• unreliable supply
• hedging points