Intermittent demand items account collectively for considerable proportions of the total stock value of any organization. Forecasting the relevant inventory requirements constitutes a very difficult task and most work in this area is based on Croston’s estimator that relies upon exponentially...

Forecasting spare parts demand is notoriously difficult, as demand is typically intermittent and lumpy. Specialized methods such as that by Croston are available, but these are not based on the repair operations that cause the intermittency and lumpiness of demand. In this paper, we do propose a...

Product returns are often characterized by a dual uncertainty on time and quantity. In the literature on inventory management with product returns, best forecasts have been associated with methods that use the most informationregarding product return history. In practice however, data is often...