A System-Approach for Recoverable Spare Parts Management Using the Discrete Weibull Distribution

Riccardo Patriarca,Giulio Di Gravio,Massimo Tronci,Tianya Hu,Francesco Costantino

doi:10.3390/su11195180

Riccardo Patriarca, Giulio Di Gravio + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su11195180

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Sep 21, 2019
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Sapienza University of Rome

Abstract

Optimal spare parts management strategies allow sustaining a system’s availability, while ensuring timely and effective maintenance. Following a systemic perspective, this paper starts from the Multi-Echelon Technique for Recoverable Item Control (METRIC) to investigate the potential use of a Weibull distribution for modelling items’ demand in case of failure. Adapting the analytic formulation of METRIC through a Discrete Weibull distribution, this study originally proposes a METRIC-based model (DW-METRIC) to be used for modelling the stochastic demand in multi-item systems, in order to ensure process sustainability. The DW-METRIC has been tested in a case study related to an industrial plant constituted by 98 items in a passive redundancy configuration. Comparing the results via a simulation model, the outcomes of the study allow defining applicability criteria for the DW-METRIC, in those settings where the DW-METRIC offers more accurate estimations than the traditional METRIC.

Highlights

In the current competitive industrial scenario, equipment requires optimum inventory management, especially in those sectors where any failure may have critical consequences on both productivity and safety
This section illustrates the application of the Discrete Weibull (DW)-Multi-Echelon Technique for Recoverable Item Control (METRIC) in an illustrative case study to ensure a sustainable spare parts allocation for an industrial plant
Starting from the large applications of Weibull distribution in reliability engineering, this paper presents the results of substituting the Poisson distribution for the pipeline with a Discrete Weibull distribution

Summary

Introduction

In the current competitive industrial scenario, equipment requires optimum inventory management, especially in those sectors (e.g., aviation, defense, oil and gas, nuclear power plants, etc.) where any failure may have critical consequences on both productivity and safety. Considering the supply chain’s organization of these systems as a complex network structure (multi-echelon) with multiple items related through different levels of the bill of materials (multi-indenture), spare parts require accurate, sustainable and cost-effective management strategies. Due to the modern supply chain’s complexity (i.e., high number of items, tight functional inter-relationships, highly-interacting logistic network structure, differentiated maintainability), it has progressively started falling short for modelling real operating conditions. Approaches aimed at optimizing the system’s parameters jointly—system-approach [1]—allow for defining an overall cost-availability function, with an increasing interest in a number of industrial case studies. The METRIC’s target consists of defining a sustainable solution to optimally allocate spare parts in warehouses at different levels of the logistic network, ensuring minimum holding and backorder cost, subject to an availability constraint. As has emerged in the literature, the traditional Poisson METRIC remains the most used approach, even if there are several alternative distributions proposed to deal with some peculiar demand patterns, (e.g.,) Refs. [4,5,6]

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