The inventory management system for automobile spare parts in a central warehouse

Because of the complex structure of spare parts supply chain, the conventional approaches, which do not consider the relationships between decision factors globally, cannot achieve the optimal performance. Therefore, this paper aims to develop an enhanced fuzzy neural network (EFNN) based decision support system for managing automobile spares inventory in a central warehouse. In this system, the EFNN is utilized for forecasting the demand for spare parts. However, without considering relevant domain knowledge, traditional neural networks are found to be suffered from the problem of low accuracy of forecasting unseen examples. Therefore, in our EFNN, the following improvement is made: First, it assigns connection weights based on the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method without painstakingly turning them. Second, by generating and refining activation functions according to genetic algorithm, our EFNN can provide comprehensive and accurate activation functions and fit a wider range of nonlinear models. Last, but not least, an adaptive input variable is introduced to decrease the impact of the bullwhip effect on the forecasting accuracy. The proposed system is evaluated with the real word data and experimental results indicate that our EFNN outperforms other five models in fill rate and stock cost measures. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.