Research on the inventory control of electric multiple units spare parts considering lateral transshipments

EMU spare parts are important materials to ensure the safe and stable operation of EMUs, which need to maintain a relatively high level of inventory. Besides EMU spare parts center inventory management is relatively independent, while the spare parts replenishment lead time is volatile, such as imported parts are easy to supply untimely. In this paper, we study the problem of inventory control of EMU spare parts, formulate a reasonable inventory level to ensure supply, and reduce the risk of stock-outs. Introduce transshipment to realize inventory sharing among EMU spare parts centers to reduce inventory costs, and we consider the impact of replenishment cycle differences on the stochastic demand for EMU spare parts. The study shows that there is a unique optimal inventory level under the transshipment model, and the corresponding inventory levels should be set according to different replenishment lead times. The transshipment inventory model under centralized decision-making reduces the out-of-stock quantity while reducing the total cost compared to the non-transshipment inventory model under decentralized decision-making.