A lot sizing heuristic for deteriorating items with shortages in growing and declining markets

In this article, we consider the inventory replenishment problem with shortages over a fixed time horizon for a product deteriorating at a constant rate. We do not put restrictions on the length of the replenishment cycles and the form of the demand function, making our model a general one. For linearly and exponentially time varying demands, the results of a comparative work show that our heuristic is economically and computationally more efficient than the equal cycle approach.