Analytical tools for robust strategic and tactical planning in maintenance logistics networks

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Maintenance and repairing services including the aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) industry is a growing sector in Canada that has been contributing to the economy by creating jobs and revenue over the past few years. High system availability is essential for advanced capital goods such as aircraft, mainframe computers, and medical devices. Due to the high variety and price of spare parts, customers of such equipment are more and more reducing their in-house maintenance investment and prefer to outsource major parts of system upkeep to an external service provider. The Maintenance Logistics Network (MLN) is a multi-echelon supply chain composing of spare part suppliers, maintenance service providers, and equipment users. Such supply chains, in the context of complex equipment, differ from manufacturing value chains due to the large number and diversity of spare parts, extremely sporadic part failure rates, uncertain repair times, high prices of individual parts, and financially remarkable effect of spare part shortage. Increasing worldwide competition and shrinking profit margins are forcing this capital-intensive sector to find novel decision tools in order to improve the service quality and lead-time.***While spare part inventory planning for in-house maintenance systems has been extensively investigated in the literature, less research has been devoted to link inventory policies with strategic and tactical plans in MLNs in the context of external service providers. This significant gap in the literature in addition to financial issues Canadian MRO industries have been recently facing attracted our attention to investigate this problem from a supply chain viewpoint. Nevertheless, the latter raises several challenging questions in terms of coordination among independent MLN stakeholders. The overall objective of this research program is hence to propose an advanced modelling and algorithmic framework for MLN strategic and tactical planning while incorporating service part inventory control policies as well as high level of uncertainty inherent in such value chains. Designing coordination mechanisms among stakeholders of these logistics networks is another key element of this research program. Our methodology mainly relies on stochastic programming, decomposition algorithms, meta heuristics, supply chain coordination contracts, discrete-event simulation, and approximation algorithms for performance evaluation of multi-echelon inventory systems. ***By providing robust decision support tools, this multidisciplinary research program is expected to assist Canadian service/repair sector remain economically sustainable while maximising customer service level.