A New Technique for Depot and Sub-Depot Spares

This paper presents work in analyzing the combined spares provisioning implementation for depot and sub-depots. A method was developed for obtaining the minimum number of depot plus sub-depot spares. Not only is the number of spares important, but their cost as well. In order for the sub-depot model to achieve the savings in spares, a large number of depots (depots plus sub-depots) will be required than is required by the depot model, but the total capacity of this larger number of depots will be less than the capacity of the depots using the simple depot model. Therefore, one must not only study the numbers of spares and their cost, but must also account for the cost of the depots and sub-depots in order to truly optimize the design.