A periodic inventory model for stocking modular components

We study the benefit obtained by exploiting modular product design in fulfilling exogenous demand for both a complete assembly and its components in a service parts inventory system. Our goal is to reduce overall service system costs by allowing assembly and/or disassembly (A/D) to occur at some unit cost per A/D action. In an extensive set of computational experiments, we compare a naive stocking and operating policy that treats all items independently and ignores the modular product structure and related A/D capability to the optimal base stock policy, and to a policy that allows A/D from the naive stocking levels. While extensive computational analysis shows that the optimal base stock policy improves the system cost between 3% to 26% over the naive approach, simply allowing A/D from the naive stocking levels captures a significant portion (an average of 67%) of the naive–optimal gap. Our computational results demonstrate that the optimization shifts the component-assembly mix from the naive levels and that limiting A/D capacity affects this mix. Limiting A/D capacity can actually increase the expected number of A/D actions (versus the uncapacitated case), since the optimization shifts stocking levels to reduce the probability that ‘too many’ actions will be required.