Economic order quantity model with trade credit financing for non‐decreasing demand

Researchers in the past have established their inventory lot‐size models under trade credit financing by assuming that the demand rate is constant. However, from a product life cycle perspective, it is only in the maturity stage that demand is near constant. During the growth stage of a product life cycle (especially for high‐tech products), the demand function increases with time. To obtain robust and generalized results, we extend the constant demand to a linear non‐decreasing demand function of time. As a result, the fundamental theoretical results obtained here are suitable for both the growth and maturity stages of a product life cycle. In addition, we characterize the optimal solutions and obtain conclusions on important and relevant managerial phenomena. Lastly, we provide several numerical examples to illustrate the proposed model and its optimal solution.