An Improved Stacking Model for Equipment Spare Parts Demand Forecasting Based on Scenario Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of spare parts management is to maximize the system’s availability and minimize the economic costs. The problem of cost availability trade-off leads to the problem of spare parts demand prediction. Accurate and reasonable spare parts demand forecasting can realize the balance between cost and availability. So, this paper focuses on spare parts management during the equipment normal operation phase and tries to forecast the demand of spare parts in a specific inspection and replacement cycle. Firstly, the equipment operation and support scenarios are analyzed to obtain the supportability data related to spare parts requirements. Then, drawing on the idea of ensemble learning, a new feature selection method has been designed, which can overcome the limitations of a single feature selection method. In addition, an improved stacking model is proposed to predict the demand for spare parts. In the traditional stacking model, there are two levels of learning, base-learning, and meta-learning, in which the outputs of base learners are taken as the input of the meta learner. However, the proposed model brings the initial feature together with the output of the base learner layer as the input of the meta learner layer. And experiments have shown that the performance of the improved stacking model is better than the base learners and the traditional stacking model on the same data set.