EURO Working Group on Stochastic Modelling

FIRST MEETING: 19-21 APRIL 2006, AMSTERDAM

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Abstracts

Marco Bijvank, Heuristics for Car Stock Management

In this presentation we focus on the repair kit problem, which is a special case of a multi-item inventory system. High customer service is becoming an important strategy to increase the competitiveness of a firm. Since customers perceive a good quality of service when all the items they demand are on stock, it becomes more realistic to model customer satisfaction with an order-based service level. A well known problem from literature is the repair kit problem, which has an after sales service setting. In this problem technicians visit customers to repair machine failures and extra costs are incurred whenever the repairer has to come back to complete a repair if not all the required parts were available at the first visit. Therefore, technicians have to take along some spare parts, taking into account the holding costs (and other limitations like space or budget). Most (practical) models implement a cost minimization objective, while a service requirement is neglected. We have improved the most general heuristic for cost minimization models as well as for service agreement models, such that we achieve near-optimal solutions which indicate which spares to take and in which quantity.