Classification of forecasting methods in production engineering

Abstract

Business management is a continuous decision-making process. It is difficult to imagine a company that does not use forecasting techniques. Even small enterprises without relevant forecasting departments more or less consciously anticipate future events, forecasting the volume of production and setting directions for development. Today’s production companies must quickly adapt to changing customer requirements, implementing structural and technological changes and delivering projects related to the production of new products. Under the dynamically changing conditions, the functioning and effective management of modern enterprises depend on future-oriented information. This increases the validity of forecasting. This article aimed to identify forecasting methods and areas of their use in production engineering. The publications on this subject were reviewed in the Scopus database, using the time frame from January 1970 to June 2018. An original classification of research subareas was created using VOS viewer software, and then, a bibliometric map was developed to visualise the results of the word coexistence analysis. The analysis of the co-occurrence and co-classification of words made it possible to indicate research subareas of forecasting in production engineering and related emerging research areas and issues.

Keywords

• forecasting
• forecasting methods
• production engineering
• manufacturing company