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 repleni shment policy for a product where demand is increasing linearly. However, l ittle research has been carried out on replenishment when the trend in dema nd is non-linear. An exciting result is that the necessary conditions of so me 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 comp utational result is very encouraging when the parameter vector is tested wi thin a certain range. It is shown that the average performance of this ecle ctic approach is superior to other heuristics. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.