A General Repairable Spare Part Demand Model Based on Quasi Birth and Death Process

This paper aims at two problems which exist in most of repairable spare part demand models at present: the exponential distribution as the basic assumption and one typical distribution corresponding to a model. A general repairable spare part demand model built on quasi birth-and-death process is developed. This model assumes that both the operational time of the unit and the maintenance time of the unit follow the continuous time phase type distributions. The first passage time distribution to be out of spares, the first mean time to be out of spares, and an algorithm to get the minimal amount of spares under certain restrictions are obtained. At the end of this paper, a numerical example is given.

This paper aims at two problems which exist in most of repairable sparc part demand models at present： the exponential distribution as the basic assumption and one typical distribution corresponding to a model. A general repairable spare part demand model built on quasi birth-and-death process is developed. This model assumes that both the operational time of the unit and the maintenance time of the unit follow the continuous time phase type distributions. The first passage time distribution to be out of spares, the first mean time to be out of spares, and an algorithm to get the minimal amount of spares under certain restrictions are obtained. At the end of this paper, a numerical example is given.