Evaluation of time-varying availability in multi-echelon inventory system under combat damage

Abstract

The models for multi-echelon inventory systems in existing literatures predominantly address failures due to reliability in peacetime. In wartime or even peacetime operational scenarios, unexpected combat damage can cause a large number of systems to be heavily damaged, to the extent that they become irreparable. In this paper, we study a multi-echelon spare parts support system under combat damage, discuss the replenishment policy and propose an approximate method to evaluate the time-varying system performance - operational availability considering the effect of passivation. Experiments show our model works well and efficiently against simulation. © 2005 IEEE.