A fast heuristic for minimising total average cycle stock subject to practical constraints

We address a problem of setting reorder intervals (time supplies) of a population of items, subject to a restricted set of possible intervals as well as a limit on the total number of replenishments per unit time, both important practical constraints. We provide a dynamic programming formulation for obtaining the optimal solution. In addition, a simple and efficient heuristic algorithm has been developed. Computational experiments show that the performance of the heuristic is excellent based on a set of realistic examples.