A hybrid LSTM method for forecasting demands of medical items in humanitarian operations

Hasni, Marwa, Babai, M. Zied and Rostami-Tabar, Bahman ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3730-0045 2024. A hybrid LSTM method for forecasting demands of medical items in humanitarian operations. International Journal of Production Research 10.1080/00207543.2024.2306904 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The inventory management of medical items in humanitarian operations is a challenging task due to the intermittent nature of their demand and long replenishment lead-times. An effective response to humanitarian emergencies is often associated with excess inventories, which leads to high costs. Henceforth, using accurate demand forecasts to control the inventories of these medical items is shown to be a significant lever to reduce inventory costs while keeping high service levels. This paper investigates the effectiveness of parametric and non-parametric demand forecasting methods that are commonly considered to deal with items characterized with intermittent demand patterns. Moreover, we propose a new hybrid deep learning method that combines the long short-term memory neural network and the support vector regression. Such combination enables to deal with complex and non-linear data. We conduct an empirical investigation by means of data related to 523 medical items managed in two warehouses of a major humanitarian organization. The forecast accuracy and the inventory efficiency of the methods is analyzed. The empirical results show the high performance of the deep learning methods. The investigation enables to gain insights on the relative forecasting performance of the methods under particular values of the demand and lead-times. These insights are valuable not only in the context of medical items in humanitarian operations, but also for any items with intermittent demand patterns.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HA Statistics
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	0020-7543
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 January 2024
Date of Acceptance:	3 January 2024
Last Modified:	06 Mar 2024 21:11
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165196

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