Optimizing spare part management for vessels in liner shipping

Abstract

Seagoing vessels require regular maintenance. Preventive maintenance can be planned ahead of time, and can be executed either at sea or while visiting a port. The spare parts used when performing maintenance can come from warehouses that store the parts until needed at a port, but they can also come from on-vessel storages. Some spare parts must be available on a vessel at all times, in the case that corrective maintenance is required. This chapter considers liner shipping, where each vessel follows a pre-planned itinerary and a number of preventive maintenance tasks have been scheduled over time. A mathematical model is proposed that can be used to decide where to store spare parts, how many spare parts to keep in inventory, when to order spare parts from suppliers, and when and where to perform the scheduled maintenance tasks. Numerical experiments show that the model can be solved very quickly. The model can thus be used as a tool to support making decisions related to inventory management for spare parts.