A COMPARISON OF ALLOCATION POLICIES IN A 2-ECHELON REPAIRABLE-ITEM INVENTORY MODEL

The objective of this paper is to evaluate three allocation policies i n a two-echelon machine repair model with state-dependent failure and repair rates. The first echelon consists of a number of bases that are served by a central depot in the second echelon. The operations at ea ch base are modeled as a machine repair problem. Due to the complexity of the general model, a simulation study was conducted whereby the re generative method of data collection was used. Two static and one dyna mic allocation policy were compared with respect to five criteria. Bas ed on the distribution of the observations, stochastic dominance tests were conducted and it was observed that static policies did not diffe r. The dynamic policy was found to be superior in a majority of the cr iteria.