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An effective spare part supply system planning is essential to achieve a high capital asset availability. We investigate the design problem of a repair shop in a single echelon repairable multi-item spare parts supply system. The repair shop usually consists of several servers with different skill sets. Once a failure occurs in the system, the failed part is queued to be served by a suitable server that has the required skill. We model the repair shop as a collection of independent sub-systems, where each sub-system is responsible for repairing certain types of failed parts. The procedure of partitioning a repair shop into sub-systems is known as pooling, and the repair shop formed by the union of independent sub-systems is called a pooled repair shop. Identifying the best partition is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem. In this direction, we formulate the problem as a stochastic nonlinear integer …