A heuristic to minimize the Inventory Value of Repairable Parts with Service Constraints: Application to an Airline Company

Resumen

This paper focuses on the improvement of the inventory management of repairable parts of the airline company Air Nostrum. The company uses the sales replacement policy to manage their repairable parts and the same target fill rate is required for every item in order to assure a high availability of the aircrafts, dealing to a high inventory value. However, this paper shows that an alternative heuristic approach outperforms that approach in terms of inventory value while fulfilling the target fill rate that has been set for repairable parts. This improvement is illustrated with an extensive and real dataset.