JOINT INVENTORY REPLACEMENT POLICIES FOR PARALLEL MACHINES/

In many manufacturing settings there is a significant cost associated with lost capacity due to machine failures. When this is combined with long lead times on the procurement of spare parts, it is often necess ary to maintain inventories of critical machine components. Thus, the maintenance policy for the machines is inherently coupled to the inven tory policy for spare parts. In this paper we identify and investigate the relationship between these two policies.