In Schittekat and Sörensen (2009) we describe the development of a tabu-search based software tool to support tactical decision-making in the spare parts supply chain of Toyota Europe. For the distribution of spare parts to car dealers in Europe, Toyota operates two hubs, one in Germany and one in the Czech Republic. Car dealers requiring spare parts may place an order by telephone or the inter...

We consider an inventory model for spare parts with two stockpoints, providing repairable parts for a critical component of advanced technical systems. As downtime costs for these systems are huge, ready-for-use spare parts are kept on stock, to be able to quickly respond to a breakdown of a system. We allow for lateral transshipments of parts between the stockpoints upon a demand arrival for a...

Machines at customers have to be provided with spare parts upon failure. Consider a number of groups of machines, for each of which a target aggregate fill rate or target average response time (waiting time) should be met. Between groups, commonality exists, i.e., some parts occur in the material breakdown structure of machines in multiple groups. Instead of using separate stocks per group of m...