Batching policies for a product life cycle

This paper considers a general, time-varying, continuous, deterministic demand pattern. It looks specifically at demand through a complete product life cycle but its approach is not restricted to this context. It breaks the demand pattern up into segments and approximates the pattern for each segment by a cubic polynomial. It then uses a conceptually straightforward approach to determine the stock replenishment schedule which minimises the total discounted cost of batch set up and stockholding.