(s, S) Spare Part Inventory System

This paper deals with a continuous review (s,S) spare part inventory system. The distributions of service life of each part and the replenishment lead time are assumed to be exponential. Assuming that there is never more than a single order outstanding, we obtain the average annual cost of operating the inventory system. If the length of stockout period is small enough to be neglected compared to the length of operating period, the optimal operating policy variables minimizing the cost rate can be calculated iteratively. For the case of one-for-one ordering (that is, s=S-1), an exact cost rate, and a closed form decision rule minimizing the cost rate are obtained for a more general situation in which more than one order is allowed to be outstanding and the distribution of the replenishment lead time is general.