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This paper is an extension of Deng et al. (2007) that was published in the European Journal of Operational Research. We have generalized their model from ramp type demand to arbitrary positive demand while theoretically discovering an important phenomenon: the optimal solution is actually independent of the demand as pointed out by Wou (2010), Hung (2011) and Lin (2011). We extend their inventory models in which the deteriorated rate is any non-negative function and backlog rate is inversely linearly related to the waiting time. Our findings will provide a new inventory system to help decision makers decide the optimal ordering quantity and replenishment policy

This paper discusses why the selection of a finite planning horizon is preferable to an infinite one for a replenishment policy of production inventory models. In a production inventory model, the production rate is dependent on both the demand rate and the inventory level. When there is an exponentially decreasing demand, the application of an infinite planning horizon model is not suitable. The emphasis of this paper is threefold. First, while pointing out questionable results from a previous study, we propose a corrected infinite planning horizon inventory model for the first replenishment cycle. Second, while investigating the optimal solution for the minimization problem, we found that the infinite planning horizon should not be applied when dealing with an exponentially decreasing demand. Third, we developed a new production inventory model under a finite planning horizon for practitioners. Numerical examples are provided to support our findings.

This paper is a response to two papers. We improve the lengthy proof for the first paper by an elegant verification. For the second paper, we point out the three-sequence approach will result in different convergent rates such that when the other two sequences are converged, the ordering quantity sequence may still not converge to the optimal solution. We construct a novel iterative method to simplify the previous approach proposed by the three-sequence approach for the optimal solution. By the same numerical examples of three published papers, we demonstrate that we can control our findings to converge more accurately than previous results. Moreover, we show that there are three distinct features of our proposed approach. (i) It converges to the desired solution within the preassigned threshold value. (ii) We estimate the convergent ratio. (iii) We find the dominant factors for our proposed convergent sequence.

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