TWO NONCONVEX MINIMIZATION APPROACHES FOR THE PROBLEM OF DETERMINING AN ECONOMIC ORDERING POLICY FOR JOINTLY REPLENISHED ITEMS
Takao Tanaka, Phan Thiên Thach, Shigemichi Suzuki · Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan · 1991
This paper describes nonconvex minimization approaches for the' problem of determining an economic ordering policy for jointly replenished items. After reducing the object, function in the problem to a single-variable nonconvex function, two methods are proposed for solving the problem. One is the Successive Underestimation Method which utilizes effectively the properties of the function A/t + Bt. Another is a modification of the Relief Indicator Method. Different from other heuristic methods ever proposed for the problem, the methods developed in this paper can obtain a global approximate solution within any prescribed error bound as we like. Results of computational tests show that both of the proposed methods perform equally well for many test problems.