This paper presents a framework capable of accurately forecasting future sales in the retail industry and classifying the product portfolio according to the expected level of forecasting reliability. The proposed framework, that would be of great use for any company operating in the retail industry, is based on Facebook's Prophet algorithm and backtesting strategy. Real-world sales forecasting benchmark data obtained experimentally in a production environment in one of the biggest retail companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina is used to evaluate the framework and demonstrate its capabilities in a real-world use case scenario.

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Transportation occupies one-third of the amount in the logistics costs, and accordingly transportation systems largely influence the performance of the logistics system. This work presents an adaptive data-driven innovative modular approach for solving the real-world Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) in the field of logistics. The work consists of two basic units: (i) an innovative multi-step algorithm for successful and entirely feasible solving of the VRP problems in logistics, (ii) an adaptive approach for adjusting and setting up parameters and constants of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm combines several data transformation approaches, heuristics and Tabu search. Moreover, as the performance of the algorithm depends on the set of control parameters and constants, a predictive model that adaptively adjusts these parameters and constants according to historical data is proposed. A comparison of the acquired results has been made using the Decision Support System with predictive models: Generalized Linear Models (GLM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The algorithm, along with the control parameters, which using the prediction method were acquired, was incorporated into a web-based enterprise system, which is in use in several big distribution companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The results of the proposed algorithm were compared with a set of benchmark instances and validated over real benchmark instances as well. The successful feasibility of the given routes, in a real environment, is also presented.Keywords Vehicle routing problem  Multi-step algorithm  Data-driven approach  Parameter setting problem  Real-world constraints in logistics

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