ABSTRACT
In general, using the Newton-Raphson method to find the root of an equation is a simple and popular algorithm. And it is a suitable process to locate the optimal ordering time for the inventory model taking into account the time value as mentioned in Dohi et al. [RAIRO: Oper. Res. 26 (1992) 1–14]. However, it sometimes cannot obtain the optimal solution because of the selection of a starting point. When the objective function has two roots, arbitrarily selecting a starting point may cause the iterated sequence not to converge to the optimal solution. Hence, in order to overcome this problem, we apply the Silver-Meal heuristic approach which produces a point as its starting point for the Newton-Raphson method to establish the steps of the algorithm. From the numerical examples, we show that the proposed method is more efficient than the bisection method that is cited by two recent papers.