Investigation of large scale multi-echelon service systems

Abstract

There exist many instances of large scale systems composed of a number of operational units each having a number of stand alone operating machines experiencing periodic breakdowns. Within this category of systems, there are some which experience relatively severe operating conditions and a high level of utilization, and so have a high demand for maintenance. Studies are required to facilitate the development of managerial policies for the design and operation of such systems. Past work in the operations management and operations research literature has used many restrictive assumptions in order to make optimization studies of these systems feasible. Unfortunately, this has lead to results which are often limited in their applicability. In this paper, simulation analysis is used to investigate the impact of various policies in such systems with a view to testing certain observed practices and intuitively appealing heuristic decision rules, in order to provide some guidance for actual decisions . In particular, the interdependent policies for operating machine replacement, transportation, distribution and maintenance are investigated for a number of different system structures. The analysis leads to some results that agree with intuition and others that do not.