Research on the spare parts inventory control for agriculture inter-district field operation

Abstract

With the development, more and more research has begun to focus on product service systems. Product service systems link tangible products with intangible services to improve the company’s competitiveness. As an important part of product service, after-sales service directly affects the company’s image and interests. In order to ensure a good after-sales service level, the manufacturing company sets up service district for each service provider. Each service provider is only responsible for providing the required spare parts within the service district, which guarantees the service level to some extent. However, due to the instability of demand, spare parts inventory of service providers often suffers from shortages or accumulation problems. Shortage of stocks will cause excessive demand delay penalty, and the accumulation of stocks will result in a large amount of funds. How to ensure the level of service, balance the shortage and accumulation of inventory, and reduce the cost of spare parts have become an urgent problem to be solved. In order to make full use of inventory and reduce the amount of funds used, this paper do the research on spare parts inventory optimization for inter-district transport. At the same time, taking into account the need of transport vehicles in transport, this paper considers the restrictions on transport vehicles. This paper studies the optimization of spare parts inventory for inter-district transport, taking into account the limitation of the capacity of transport vehicles. Due to the limited capacity of transport vehicles, the setting of transshipment priority should not only consider the distance between service providers, but also consider the relationship between the number of transshipments and the number of vehicles required. In order to minimize the cost of spare parts, the paper establishes an inventory optimization model with the inter-district transport, and presents a mathematical model for directly transporting spare parts without considering transport vehicles and a mathematical model that does not consider inter-district transport. We find that, whether to consider the restrictions of transport vehicles, system behavior can vary drastically.