Numerical study of inventory management under various maintenance policies

Capital assets, such as manufacturing equipment, require maintenance to remain functioning. Maintenance can be performed when a component breaks down and needs replacement (i.e., corrective maintenance), or the maintenance and part replacement can be performed preventively. Preventive maintenance can be planned on a periodic basis (periodic maintenance), or it can be triggered by a certain monitored condition (condition-based maintenance). Preventive maintenance policies are gaining traction in the business world, but for many companies it is unclear what their impact is on the resulting inventory requirements for the spare parts that are used for the maintenance interventions. We study the impact of the maintenance policy on the inventory requirements and the corresponding costs for a setting that is realistic at an OEM in the compressed air industry. Preventive policies increase the total demand for spare parts compared to corrective maintenance, since the former do not exploit the entire useful life of the components. This leads to higher inventory requirements. At the same time, the preventive policies inhibit advance demand information, as the interventions, and correspondingly the spare parts demands, are planned in advance. Using a simulation study, we show that by using this advance demand information in managing the spare part inventory, the increase in inventory requirements of preventive maintenance policies can to a large extent be offset; for condition-based maintenance, we find that inventories can even be lower compared to corrective maintenance, provided that the advance demand information is used correctly when managing inventories. Our analysis sheds light on the behaviour of the inventory related costs under various maintenance policies.