A Simple Inventory Replenishment Decision Rule for a Linear Trend in Demand

We consider the situation of a deterministic demand pattern having a linear trend. The problem is to select the timing and sizes of replenishments so as to keep the total of replenishment and carrying costs as low as possible. An earlier developed heuristic for the general case of a deterministic, time-varying, demand pattern is specialized to the case of a linear trend. The simple decision rule is shown to lead to small cost penalties in two examples that have been exactly analyzed in an earlier article in this journal.