A New Bootstrap Simulation Method for Intermittent Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting is the basis of management activities including marketing strategy. Especially, the demand of a part is remarkably important in supply chain management (SCM). In the fields of various industries, the part demand usually has the intermittent characteristic. The intermittent characteristic implies a phenomenon that there frequently occurs zero demands. In the intermittent demands, non-zero demands have large variance and their appearances also have stochastic nature. Accordingly, in the intermittent demand forecasting, it is inappropriate to apply the traditional time series models and/or cause-effect methods such as linear regression; they cannot describe the behaviors of intermittent demand. Markov bootstrap method was developed to forecast the intermittent demand. It assumes that first-order autocorrelation and independence of lead time demands. To release the assumption of independent lead time demands, this paper proposes a modified bootstrap method. The method produces the pseudo data having the characteristics of historical data approximately. A numerical example for real data will be provided as a case study.