Solution techniques for wholesale provisioning of replacement parts

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to present solution tech­niques for provisioning problems arising in the Navy's wholesale purchase of replacement parts. The objective is to minimize the Mean Supply Response Time (MSRT) subject to a budget constraint. The problem can be formulated as a Dynamic Program (DP), however, it is too large and complex for a standard recursive dynamic approach. Conseguently, a variation of the normal DP approach was developed that significantly reduces the required computations. An existing DP computer program was modified to implement this DP variation. The result is a usable approach considering speed and ease of manipulation.