Heuristics for replenishment with linear decreasing demand

For a product where demand is increasing, many methods have been proposed f or the determination of the replenishment policy. However, there is little published research on replenishment when the trend in demand is decreasing, although it is of some importance. Here a new approach is proposed to over come the difficulties in the linear decreasing case, and an analytic algori thm developed so that several well-known heuristics can be applied by simpl y varying the parameter vector, as in previous papers. It is shown that the average performance of this eclectic approach is superior to other heurist ics. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.