Heuristics for replenishment with linear decreasing demand

Abstract For a product where demand is increasing, many methods have been proposed for 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 overcome the difficulties in the linear decreasing case, and an analytic algorithm developed so that several well-known heuristics can be applied by simply varying the parameter vector, as in previous papers. It is shown that the average performance of this eclectic approach is superior to other heuristics.