Neural Network with Specialized Knowledge for Forecasting Intermittent Demand

Demand forecasting is an essential part of an efficient inventory control system. However, when the demand has an intermittent or lumpy behavior, forecasting it becomes a challenging task. Several methods have been developed to solve this issue, but nonetheless, they only consider the information about the occurrence of demand, failing to assess the drivers of the data behavior. With the current digitalization of the industry, more data is available and, therefore, the chances of finding a causal relationship between the available data and the demand increases. Considering that, this paper proposes a single-hidden layer neural network for forecasting irregularly spaced time series with attributes conveying information about the past demand, seasonality of the data and specialized knowledge about the process. The neural network proposed is compared with benchmark neural networks and traditional forecasting methods for intermittent demand using three different performance measures on actual demand data from an industry operating in the aircraft maintenance sector. Statistical analysis is conducted on comparison results to identify significant differences in the forecasting methods according to each performance measure.