An analytic eclectic heuristic for replenishment with 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. An interesting result is that the necessary conditions of some of these models have the same structure, and differ only by a single parameter in an equation. An earlier paper which made use of this result searched for the solution by varying this parameter, using an iterative method. The authors describe an analytic algorithm so that a near-optimal solution can be obtained by varying the parameter within a certain range. The results of the previous paper are updated. The average performance of the algorithm is to give results that are only 1/60% above the optimal values of the total cost.