On the End-of-Life Inventory Problem
Tarih:
Konum: A329
Abstract
This talk considers a consumer electronic manufacturer’s problem of controlling the inventory of spare parts in the final phase of the service life cycle. In the literature, this is known as the end-of-life (EOL) inventory problem. The final phase starts when the part production is terminated and continues until the last service contract or warranty period expires. To meet demand during this period, the so-called final order is placed at the beginning of this phase. A popular policy to satisfy the demand is either repair or replace the defective item depending on its condition which is called a repair-replacement policy. However, for consumer electronic product there typically is considerable price erosion while repair and replace costs stay constant over time. As a consequent, there might be a point in time at which switching to an alternative service policy will be a more cost effective policy. An alternative policy could be offering customers a new product at a discounted price or a voucher to purchase the next generation product. Consequently, this requires the joint optimization problem of final order quantity and switching time from repair to an alternative service policy which will minimize the total expected discounted costs of the manufacturer. The presentation includes two parts in which the problem is solved under different assumptions. In the first part, we will show how we solved its static version and in the second part, we will describe the problem under a general cost structure in a continuous switching time set and we will discuss the solving strategy of the problem which we used the dynamic programming approach.
Bio of the Speaker
Sonja Javadi Khatab is a Ph.D. candidate at the Industrial Engineering department at Sabanci University. She received her MS.c. in Industrial Engineering from Qazvin Azad University, and her BS.c. in Pure Mathematics from Shahid Madani University, both in Iran. Her dissertation focuses on solving the so-called End-of- Life inventory problem under different assumptions. Her main research interests are stochastic processes, probability theory and their applications in operations research and statistical process control. She is also interested in applying Markov decision processes and dynamic programming in real life problems of operations research.