An agent-based approach for resources’ joint planning in a multi-echelon inventory system considering lateral transshipment

A joint planning of spare parts and maintenance workers in cross-echelon and lateral transshipment can reduce total system cost; however, only a limited part of the literature considers this combination. In this paper, we propose an agent-based generic evaluation model for the joint planning of resources by examining the multi-echelon inventory system with the operation management of multi-component equipment. First, a dual-clock failure modelling mechanism is provided to accurately generate the maintenance resource requirements. Afterwards, a resources scheduling process based on the contract net protocol is described. In addition, the dynamic change in the spare parts inventory is also analysed by considering whether the replaced failure components can be repaired or not. Moreover, a system cost assessment method is developed to compare different scheduling strategies and to select the one that can minimize the expected total cost. Finally, we examine an example of a two-echelon inventory system to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach by using four representative scheduling strategies: fixed-pair, nearest distance, maximum inventory and minimum ratio. The results indicate that the approach can well support the joint planning of maintenance resources.