Scheduling policies for a repair shop problem

In this paper we take another look at the Myopic(R) scheduling policy proposed by Liang et al. (2013). The Myopic(R) policy is much more time efficient, coming with a small loss of optimality. This policy is useful when one repair shop for every machine type is combined to one central repair shop. The other case Liang et al.(2013) look at is the base case, where one repair shop per fleet is used. In this paper multiple search methods are proposed to find the optimal costs for both the base case as the central repair shop case under the Myopic(R) policy. These search methods are based on the convexity of the cost functions of the base case and the CRS case. which is proven for the first and conjectured for the second. The proposed methods show great improvement in calculation time. In Liang et al. (2013) it is shown that the CRS is preferred over the base case for certain a certain factor α. We show for which values the cost minima of the base case and the CRS case are in equilibrium., which means that we know when it is benificial to use which repair shop strategy.