The Effects of Transshipment Link on the Design of Spare Parts Network With Time-Window Based Service Level

We investigate the design problems of service parts network considering time-window-based service level and multiple operational flexibilities, which include no transshipment, unidirectional, and/or bidirectional transshipment, and the transshipment from support warehouse. We develop discrete event simulation models, a simulation optimization methodology and the measure indexes for system performance in order to analyze the effect of operational flexibility on system performance. Through a plenty of simulation experiments, we show that complete pooling policy is not necessarily appropriate for all spare parts networks, the performance of partial pooling policy may be close to or even outperform the one of full pooling policy in some cases. Besides, we also suggest some rough guidelines for the design of spare parts system.