Models and Algorithms for the Dynamic-demand Joint Replenishment Problem

This paper deals with the problem of coordinated ordering of items having deterministic but time varying demands where there is a common ordering cost if one or more of these items are ordered in addition to individual items ordering costs. To solve this NP-hard problem we propose a number of heuristics. Also we report on a comparative study that we undertaken to evaluate the relative performance of the proposed heuristics. This study clearly identifies efficient heuristics and shows that our heuristics outperforms those proposed in the literature.