Optimal Model of Three-echelon Inventory for Repairable Spare Parts with Lateral Transshipments Strategy

Supplying the spare parts with lateral transshipments is an effective approach to improve support effectiveness.Since the existing researches do not meet the demands of multi-echelons maintenance supply system in army,inventory model considering three-echelon support system for repairable items with lateral transshipments is built based on the theories of life-death process and VMETRIC in this paper.The model is solved in a simple and efficient heuristic algorithm and the simulation shows that the model produces accurate estimation.Various support effectiveness indexes are researched;with constraints of availability and the objective of the lowest cost,the optimal inventory distribution result is obtained by marginal optimization algorithm.Compared with the model with no transshipments,numerical studies show that the model put forward in this paper not only improves support effectiveness indexes,but also has purchase expense reduced by 22.35%.