A vehicle service station is a complex system consisting of several interacting sub-systems. The two major subsystems are the workshop and store of spare parts. While workshop is the driving force to achieve the main goals of the station, spare parts store also has a significant impact on the service station performance. Due to the fast pace advancement in vehicle expert diagnostic systems (e.g. On-and Off-Board Diagnostics) and telecommunication capabilities, the fault code can automatically be generated and sent with a priority degree to vehicle service station. The service station will -in turn- analyze the fault codes and then execute the necessary actions. Like all commercial projects, a vehicle service station is continually trying to maximize the total income, while satisfying the customer demands and the service quality. The work done will be limited by the availability of associated budget, workforce, time for different shifts, equipment, and materials.
The work presented here is to develop an optimization mathematical model to represent the vehicle service station operations for vehicles that contain or do not contain self diagnostic system. The aim of this model is to maximize the total income under the limitations of different resources. A case study for the model is presented for one of the biggest well-known international vehicle service stations in Egypt, the results show that an increase of the total income by 60 %, and an increase in the utilization of the workforce from 86.53 % for the company plan to 99.83 by applying the proposed model (i.e. 115.6 %) are achieved. An adaptation is made-up to make the mathematical model user-friendly, this is done by an interface program to collect, store, and prepare the needed data for the optimization process