Simulation Based Particle Swarm Optimization of Cross-Training Policies in Spare Parts Supply Systems

We study a single location supply system for repairable spare parts. The system consists of a multi-server repair shop and inventory with ready-to-use spare parts. When a failed part is received, a new (or as-good-as-new) replacement part is sent back, and the failed part is forwarded to the repairshop. In the case of unavailability of spare parts, failed requests are backordered and fulfilled when a ready-for-use part of the same type is received from the repairshop. The repair shop has several multi-skilled parallel servers (technicians) that are capable of handling certain types of spares. In this paper, we propose a Particle Swarm Optimization heuristic combined with Discrete-Event Simulation for optimizing the cross-training policy (skill assignment scheme) while minimizing the total system cost (consisting of inventory costs, backorder penalty cost, server cost and skill cost).