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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION ECONOMICS, vol.26, pp.367-371, 1992 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
There are many procedures that can be used to determine both the Lot-size and delivery date of an order when the user demand rate is not constant. The Wagner-Whitin algorithm provides an optimal solution to the problem, but seems to be difficult to apply in practice. Incremental Order Quantity (IOQ) and Silver and Meal's Technique are the closest to the Wagner-Whitin technique. Later, Silver and Miltenburg has shown that demand patterns with a large fraction of periods with no demand can cause poor performance by the Silver-Meal heuristic. They presented a modification of the basic Silver-Meal heuristic for the situation of frequent periods with zero demand. The Incremental Order Quantity algorithm is even simpler to use than the Silver-Meal algorithm. This article shows that the IOQ can also be used for the situation of frequent periods with zero demand. Without any modification or additional calculation, the IOQ algorithm can give the same result of the Silver-Miltenburg modification.