Intermittent demand is a demand with a pattern in which zero demands occur frequently and non-zero demands occur sporadically. This type of demand mainly appears in spare parts with very low demand. Croston’s method, which is an initiative intermittent demand forecasting method, estimates the average demand by separately estimating the size of non-zero demands and the interval between non-zero demands. Such smoothing type of forecasting methods can be suitable for mid-term or long-term demand forecasting because those provides the same demand forecasts during the forecasting horizon. However, the smoothing type of forecasting methods aims at short-term forecasting, so the estimated average forecast is a factor to decrease accuracy. In this paper, we propose a forecasting method to improve short-term accuracy by improving Croston’s method for intermittent demand forecasting. The proposed forecasting method estimates both the non-zero demand size and the zero demands’ interval separately, as in Croston’s method, but the forecast at a future period adjusted by binomial weight according to occurrence probability. This serves to improve the accuracy of short-term forecasts. In this paper, we first prove the unbiasedness of the proposed method as an important attribute in forecasting. The performance of the proposed method is compared with those of five existing forecasting methods via eight evaluation criteria. The simulation results show that the proposed forecasting method is superior to other methods in terms of all evaluation criteria in short-term forecasting regardless of average size and dispersion parameter of demands. However, the larger the average demand size and dispersion are, that is, the closer to continuous demand, the less the performance gap with other forecasting methods.

In this research, we propose efficient demand forecasting scheme for intermittent demand. For this purpose, we first extensively analyze the drawbacks of the existing forecasting methods such as Croston method and Syntetos-Boylan approximation, then using these findings we propose the new demand forecasting method. Our goal is to develop forecasting method robust across many situations, not necessarily optimal for a limited number of specific situations. For this end, we adopt combining forecasting method that utilizes unbiased forecasting methods such as simple exponential smoothing and simple moving average. Various simulation results show that the proposed forecasting method performed better than the existing forecasting methods.