Efficient sizing of technical assistance service (TAS) resources for a large installed machinery base network using discrete simulation

This paper focuses on the efficient allocation of TAS resources from a machine manufacturer perspective, in order to give service to a large number of customers geographically dispersed using Discrete Event Simulation (DES). The developed model suggests the most efficient solution in terms of number of technicians and TAS location in order to maximize the availability of the machinery network and minimize the cost. Due to the high number of machines to be served by the TAS unit (over 500 machines), clustering has been used as an initial simplification method in order to model an affordable and manageable number of group of machines.