The implementation of discrete-event simulation and demand forecasting using Temporal Fusion Transformers to validate spare parts inventory policy for petrochemicals industry

Abstract

One of the important strategic factors of petrochemicals plant maintenance is the spare parts inventory policy, It is significant for the efficiency, reliability, and productivity of the petrochemicals industry. An unsuitable spare part inventory policy will lead to a loss in long engineering machinery downtime due to a shortage of spare parts. To implement the spare parts inventory policy which is able to fulfill the future demand for spare parts, calculation by various statistical theories and working processes is used to custom the spare parts inventory policy. However, to validate whether or not the customized spare parts inventory policy is suitable, the discrete-event simulation library SimPy is used to mimic the actual spare parts inventory system. It must be involved in the performance evaluation process of the customized spare parts inventory policy. The inventory simulation model consists of many events depending on the supply chain system. The crucial event which is the most complex for the simulation of spare parts inventory is the demand event. This work applies the demand forecasting technique to the simulation by using deep learning with a prebuilt architecture model called Temporal Fusion Transformers (TFT). The averaged MAE of the point predictions from a global model is 0.4874+/- 6.7744 on the validation dataset and 0.6424+/-3.4963 on the test dataset. Our method predicts a quantile forecast of the future demand which is able to handle the stochastic nature of the spare parts demand in the petrochemicals industry and the result from the simulation outcome is more accurate and close to the outcome from an actual inventory system. The information from the analysis of the simulation outcome is used by the inventory management team to make decisions about the custom inventory policy before deploying it to the actual system.