A System-Approach for Recoverable Spare Parts Management Using the Discrete Weibull Distribution

Abstract

Optimal spare parts management strategies allow sustaining a system’s availability, while ensuring timely and effective maintenance. Following a systemic perspective, this paper starts from the Multi-Echelon Technique for Recoverable Item Control (METRIC) to investigate the potential use of a Weibull distribution for modelling items’ demand in case of failure. Adapting the analytic formulation of METRIC through a Discrete Weibull distribution, this study originally proposes a METRIC-based model (DW-METRIC) to be used for modelling the stochastic demand in multi-item systems, in order to ensure process sustainability. The DW-METRIC has been tested in a case study related to an industrial plant constituted by 98 items in a passive redundancy configuration. Comparing the results via a simulation model, the outcomes of the study allow defining applicability criteria for the DW-METRIC, in those settings where the DW-METRIC offers more accurate estimations than the traditional METRIC.