A fuzzy decision support tool for demand forecasting

In this paper we present a decision support forecasting system to work with univariate time series based on the generalized exponential smoothing (Holt-Winters) approach. It is conceived as an integrated tool which has been implemented in Visual Basic. For improving the accuracy of the automatic forecasting it uses an optimization-based scheme which unifies the stages of estimation of the parameters and selects the best method using a fuzzy multicriteria approach. The elements of the set of local minima of the non-linear programming problems allow us to build the membership functions of the conflicting objectives. A set of real data is analyzed to show the performance of our forecasting tool.