Deterministic economic production quantity models with time-varying demand and cost

In today’s time-based competition, the unit cost of a high-tech product declines significantly over its short product life cycle. Consequently, in this paper, we relax the traditional economic production quantity model to allow for time-varying cost. We then prove that the optimal production schedule uniquely exists. In addition, we also show that the total cost is a convex function of the number of replenishments, which reduces the search for the optimal solution to finding a local minimum. Furthermore, we characterize the influences of both demand and cost over the length of production run time and the economic production quantity.