A simple rule for determining replenishment intervals of an inventory item with linear decreasing demand rate

Considerable amount of research efforts have not so far been devoted to inventory replenishment problems where the rate of demand decreases with time in comparison to increasing pattern of demand rate. This article presents a simple rule for determining the replenishment intervals of an inventory item having a linear decreasing demand rate over a finite planning horizon in heuristic approach. The proposed method is applied to the well-known Silver's heuristic, continuous time part period heuristic and continuous least unit cost method and its performance is examined with a numerical example. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.