Study On The Centralized Control Policy Of The Distributed Automobile Service Part Inventory System

It needs to be maintained when there are failures happening to cars and then service parts are necessary. Therefore the after sale service department of the automobile manufacturer should keep a proper amount of service parts to satisfy the customer. But customers locate in different regions; failures of cars are random; customers require service parts to be available in time. These characteristics compel the automobile manufacturer to lay out service stations nearby customers. In order to supply these service stations with service parts in time, the automobile manufacturer sets up several regional distribution centers, which are in charge of the service part supply of the service stations around. Therefore the service part inventory system of the automobile manufacturer is distributed. As the increasing of the amount of service parts in the system, it becomes difficult for the automobile manufacturer to manage the inventory effectively and some problems have come forth.In this thesis, it firstly analyses the management status quo of the service part inventory of the automobile manufacturer. And it finds out that, in the current inventory management mode, the regional distribution centers are the main bodies of supplying service parts to service stations. The regional distribution centers are in charge of the inventory replenishment of the lower service stations and apply for service parts from the upper central distribution center when there aren't enough in the local depot. In this mode, the regional distribution centers are independent from each other and there are no communication and collaboration among them. As a result, there is an unreasonable phenomenon that some regional depots ran out of stock while the total inventory of the company is overstocking. So it puts forward the centralized control policy of the distributed automobile service part inventory system to improve the situation in this thesis. This method is based on the theory of multi-echelon inventory controlling. Firstly, it founds the mathematic model of the centralized control policy. And then it develops the genetic algorithm to solve the model. In the end, it testifies the effect of the new method by an example.