Development of the Forecasting Model for Parts in an Automobile

자동차 부품 수요의 예측 모형 개발

This paper deals with demand forecasting of parts in an automobile model which has been extinct. It is important to estimate how much inventory of each part in the extinct model should be stocked because production lines of some parts may be replaced by new ones although there is still demands for the model. Furthermore, in some countries, there is a strong regulation that the automobile manufacturing company should provide customers with auto parts for several years whenever they are requested. The major characteristic of automobile parts demand forecasting is that there exists a close correlation between the number of running cars and the demand of each part. In this sense, the total demand of each part in a year is determined by two factors, the total number of running cars in that year and the failure rate of the part. The total number of running cars in year k can be estimated sequentially by the amount of shipped cars and proportion of discarded cars in years 1, 2,$\cdots$, i. However, it is very difficult to estimate the failure rate of each part because available inter-failure time data is not complete. The failure rate is, therefore, determined so as to minimize the mean squared error between the estimated demand and the observed demand of a part in years 1, 2,$\cdots$, i. In this paper, data obtained from a Korean automobile manufacturing company are used to illustrate our model.