Comparison of several heuristics using an analytic procedure for replenishment with non-linear increasing demand

A number of methods have been proposed for the determination of the replenishment policy for a product where demand is increasing linearly. However, little research has been carried out on replenishment when the trend in demand is non-linear. An exciting result is that the necessary conditions of some heuristics have the same mathematical structure, and differ only by two parameters in an equation. We develop an analytic algorithm so that several heuristics can be applied by simply varying the parameter vector. The computational result is very encouraging when the parameter vector is tested within a certain range. It is shown that the average performance of this eclectic approach is superior to other heuristics. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.