Dr Devon K. Barrow

Department of Management
Senior Lecturer in Operations Management

Contact details

Fax: +44 (0) 121 414 3217
Email: d.k.barrow@bham.ac.uk

Address: Birmingham Business School
University House
Birmingham
B15 2TT

Devon K. Barrow is a Senior Lecturer within the Procurement and Operations Management Group at the University of Birmingham Business School, and a Visiting Researcher with the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting. His research interests are in forecast model selection and combination with applications in supply chains and inventory management. He also works on problems in call centre, electric load, and utility forecasting where the challenge is to forecast high dimensional, complex seasonal patterns.

Qualifications

BSc (Hons)Computer Science and Mathematics
MSc (Distinction) Computer Science
Ph.D Management Science
Member of Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport Senior Fellow Higher Education Academy

Biography

Dr. Devon K. Barrow is a Senior Lecturer in Operations Management. His has worked across industry and practice, within government and in the private sector, with nearly 20 years’ experience living and working in the Caribbean, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Since starting his career with the Government of Saint Lucia in 1999, and subsequently with PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2001, he has worked across academia and industry, with such companies as Twinning UK, British Sky Broadcasting Ltd., Sims Metal Ltd., British Gas, Severn Trent Services and Unipart to name a few.

His research focuses on time series prediction with neural networks and statistical methods, with a particular emphasis on forecast combination and model selection. He also has an interest in education and pedagogical design with specific application to the forecasting domain. Dr. Barrow has worked on real world problems in call centre, electric load, and utility forecasting and provided knowledge transfer and consultancy in forecasting and supply chain management within the Manufacturing and Retail Sectors.

He has delivered academic and practitioner training courses in forecasting, and presents regularly at leading international forecasting conferences. He is a past member of the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants (ACCA) and a member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT).

Teaching

Operations Management (UK Exec MBA)
Operations Management (Singapore MSc Management) Operations Management (UG year 2)
Managing Global Operations (DL MSc IB)
Strategic Procurement and Supplier Management (UK Exec MBA)

Postgraduate supervision

Currently supervising PhD research in the following areas:

Forecasting, inventory and financial models
Sustainability Performance in Reverse Logistics

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

Forecasting and inventory management
Forecasting and call centre decision making
Performance management and sustainability
Forecast Education and Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Research

Research interests

Forecasting and Education
Issues in forecast model selection and combination
Forecasting for Supply Chain
Procurement and Logistics
Learning and decision support systems for forecasting and planning
Design and empirical evaluation of statistical and computational intelligence forecasting methods
Business Forecasting with specific interests in forecasting for Inventory
Call centre and Energy planning

Other activities

05/2014 - present

Honorary/Visiting Researcher
Centre for Marketing Analytics and Forecasting
Lancaster University Management School

05/2014– present

Member of the International Society for Inventory Research

05/2014 - present

Member of the Operational Research Society

05/2011 - present

Member of International Institute of Forecasters (IIF): The preeminent organisation for practitioners and academic scholars in the area of forecasting.

04/2015 – 07/2016

Principal Investigator
2015-16 Coventry University Pump-prime research Grant - £10,000
Developing Intelligent Tutoring Support for the Business Forecasting Curriculum
Collaborators: University of Canterbury, New Zealand | Lancaster University, UK | Bath University, UK.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Barrow, D, Mitrovic, A, Holland, J, Ali, M, Kourentzes, N & Leva, S (ed.) 2024, 'Developing Personalised Learning Support for the Business Forecasting Curriculum: The Forecasting Intelligent Tutoring System', Forecasting, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 204-223. https://doi.org/10.3390/forecast6010012

Barrow, D 2020, 'Automatic robust estimation for exponential smoothing: Perspectives from statistics and machine learning', Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 160, 113637. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2020.113637

Kourentzes, N, Trapero, JR & Barrow, DK 2019, 'Optimising forecasting models for inventory planning', International Journal of Production Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2019.107597

Kourentzes, N, Barrow, D & Petropoulos, F 2018, 'Another look at forecast selection and combination: Evidence from forecast pooling', International Journal of Production Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2018.05.019

Barrow, D & Kourentzes, N 2018, 'The impact of special days in call arrivals forecasting: a neural network approach to modelling special days', European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 264, no. 3, pp. 967-977. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2016.07.015

Kourentzes, N, Rostami-Tabar, B & Barrow, DK 2017, 'Demand forecasting by temporal aggregation: Using optimal or multiple aggregation levels?', Journal of Business Research, vol. 78, pp. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.04.016

Barrow, DK & Crone, SF 2016, 'A comparison of AdaBoost algorithms for time series forecast combination', International Journal of Forecasting, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 1103-1119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2016.01.006

Barrow, DK & Crone, SF 2016, 'Cross-validation aggregation for combining autoregressive neural network forecasts', International Journal of Forecasting, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 1120-1137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2015.12.011

Barrow, DK & Kourentzes, N 2016, 'Distributions of forecasting errors of forecast combinations: Implications for inventory management', International Journal of Production Economics, vol. 177, pp. 24-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2016.03.017

Barrow, DK 2016, 'Forecasting intraday call arrivals using the seasonal moving average method', Journal of Business Research, vol. 69, no. 12, pp. 6088-6096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.06.016

Kourentzes, N, Barrow, DK & Crone, SF 2014, 'Neural network ensemble operators for time series forecasting', Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 41, no. 9, pp. 4235-4244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.12.011

Mitrovic, A, Ohlsson, S & Barrow, DK 2013, 'The effect of positive feedback in a constraint-based intelligent tutoring system', Computers and Education, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 264-272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.07.002

Conference contribution

Barrow, DK & Crone, SF 2013, Crogging (cross-validation aggregation) for forecasting - A novel algorithm of neural network ensembles on time series subsamples. in 2013 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2013., 6706740, 2013 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2013, Dallas, TX, United States, 4/08/13. https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2013.6706740

Barrow, DK, Crone, SF & Kourentzes, N 2010, An evaluation of neural network ensembles and model selection for time series prediction. in 2010 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, WCCI 2010 - 2010 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2010., 5596686, 2010 6th IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, WCCI 2010 - 2010 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2010, Barcelona, Spain, 18/07/10. https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2010.5596686

Review article

Petropoulos, F, Apiletti, D, Assimakopoulos, V, Babai, MZ, Barrow, DK, Ben taieb, S, Bergmeir, C, Bessa, RJ, Bijak, J, Boylan, JE, Browell, J, Carnevale, C, Castle, JL, Cirillo, P, Clements, MP, Cordeiro, C, Cyrino Oliveira, FL, De Baets, S, Dokumentov, A, Ellison, J, Fiszeder, P, Franses, PH, Frazier, DT, Gilliland, M, Gönül, MS, Goodwin, P, Grossi, L, Grushka-Cockayne, Y, Guidolin, M, Guidolin, M, Gunter, U, Guo, X, Guseo, R, Harvey, N, Hendry, DF, Hollyman, R, Januschowski, T, Jeon, J, Jose, VRR, Kang, Y, Koehler, AB, Kolassa, S, Kourentzes, N, Leva, S, Li, F, Litsiou, K, Makridakis, S, Martin, GM, Martinez, AB, Meeran, S, Modis, T, Nikolopoulos, K, Önkal, D, Paccagnini, A, Panagiotelis, A, Panapakidis, I, Pavía, JM, Pedio, M, Pedregal, DJ, Pinson, P, Ramos, P, Rapach, DE, Reade, JJ, Rostami-Tabar, B, Rubaszek, M, Sermpinis, G, Shang, HL, Spiliotis, E, Syntetos, AA, Talagala, PD, Talagala, TS, Tashman, L, Thomakos, D, Thorarinsdottir, T, Todini, E, Trapero Arenas, JR, Wang, X, Winkler, RL, Yusupova, A & Ziel, F 2022, 'Forecasting: theory and practice', International Journal of Forecasting, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 705-871. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2021.11.001

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