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Scheduling policies for a repair shop problem

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Abstract

In this paper, we analyze a repair shop serving several fleets of machines that fail from time to time. To reduce downtime costs, a continuous-review spare machine inventory is kept for each fleet. A spare machine, if available on stock, is installed instantaneously in place of a broken machine. When a repaired machine is returned from the repair shop, it is placed in inventory for future use if the fleet has the required number of machines operating. Since the repair shop is shared by different fleets, choosing which type of broken machine to repair is crucial to minimize downtime and holding costs. The optimal policy of this problem is difficult to characterize, and, therefore, is only formulated as a Markov Decision Process to numerically compute the optimal cost and base-stock level for each spare machine inventory. As an alternative, we propose the dynamic Myopic(R) policy, which is easy to implement, yielding costs very close to the optimal. Most of the time it outperforms the static first-come-first-served, and preemptive-resume priority policies. Additionally, via our numerical study, we demonstrate that repair shop pooling is better than reserving a repair shop for each fleet.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. We would like to thank Dr. Dragan Banjevic who discussed the proof of Proposition 1 with us. We would like to thank the anonymous referee for the invaluable suggestions which helped us improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cosma International Group, Magna International, 2550 Steeles Avenue East, Brampton, ON, L6T 5R3, Canada

    William Kun Liang

  2. Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabancı University, Orhanlı-Tuzla, 34956, Istanbul, Turkey

    Barış Balcıog̃lu

  3. IMAX Corporation, 2525 Speakman Drive, Mississauga, Ontario, L5K 1B1, Canada

    Robert Svaluto

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  1. William Kun Liang
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  2. Barış Balcıog̃lu
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  3. Robert Svaluto
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Correspondence to Barış Balcıog̃lu.

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Liang, W.K., Balcıog̃lu, B. & Svaluto, R. Scheduling policies for a repair shop problem. Ann Oper Res 211, 273–288 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-013-1412-6

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