Sustainable Order Quantity of Repairable Spare Parts

In the last few years companies and researchers have focused their attention on the sustainable issues of supply chain management. In spare parts (SPs) research, traditionally focused on inventory modeling, supply chain aspects have become of relevant interests. Many contributions could be found in scientific literature about logistics of spare parts, but there is a lack of attention on the sustainable issues. In this paper, authors give a contribution to the concept of sustainable management of spare parts, by defining a spare parts logistic model. The model considers the environmental impacts and benefits related to the possibility of repairing failed parts rather than purchasing new ones. It aims at identifying the optimal means of transport, as well as the optimal SP order quantity minimizing the global logistic costs function in which economic and environmental costs of both the options of repairing and purchasing SPs are considered. The capability of the model has been tested with reference to a numerical example based on real data of a leader manufacturer of bearings.