The periodic (T,s,S) policies have received considerable attention from the academic literature. Determination of the optimal parameters is computationally prohibitive, and a number of heuristic procedures have been put forward. However, these heuristics have never been compared in an extensive...

Forecasting as a scientific discipline has progressed a lot in the last 40years, with Nobel prizes being awarded for seminal work in the field, most notably to Engle, Granger and Kahneman. Despite these advances, even today we are unable to answer a very simple question, the one that is always...