Priority Scheduling Rules for Repairable Inventory Systems

Improved priority scheduling rules are presented for a repair shop supporting a multi-item repairable inventory system with a hierarchical product structure. A variety of scheduling rules are evaluated using a simulation of a representative shop and product structure. The results indicate that dynamic rules which use inventory status information perform better than other dynamic or static rules which ignore inventory status; moreover, dynamic rules which use work-in-process inventory information outperform dynamic rules which ignore work-in-process inventory levels. In the simulation, the use of improved scheduling rules provides performance equivalent to a 20% reduction in spares inventory.