Exact and heuristic approaches for joint maintenance and spare parts planning

In this study, we consider the joint problem of preventive replacement and spare parts inventory planning. We present an exact dynamic programming formulation to minimize the total expected cost over a finite planning horizon. As it is not possible to represent the optimal solution by a well-defined and practical policy, and the dynamic programming recursion is time-consuming to apply, we propose three heuristic approaches that are easy to understand and to implement in practice: (i) Steady-State Approximation, (ii) Stationary Policy and (iii) Myopic Approach. Through computational analyses, we investigate the effects of the model parameters on the performances of the proposed heuristics.