Spare Parts Demand Forecasting：a Review

Spare parts are very common in industry and military fields, and the investigations of spare parts demand forecasting methods have draws much attention in recent years. However,to the best of our knowledge,only few papers reviewed the forecasting papers systematically. This paper is an attempt to provide a novel and comprehensive view to summarize these methods. A new framework was proposed to classify the demand forecasting methods into four categories,including empirical methods,methods based on historical data,analytical methods and simulation methods. Some typical literatures related to each category were reviewed.Moreover, a general spare parts forecasting procedure was summarized and some evaluation criteria were presented. Finally,characteristics of different forecasting methods and some avenues for further research were illustrated. This work provides the managers with a systematical idea about the spare parts demand forecasting and it can be used in practical applications.