The demand for a particular model of tablet at a particular outlet of Great Buy has had the following pattern during the past 15 weeks:

Week t 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Demand xt 34 40 34 36 40 42 46 50 55 49 49 53 63 69 65 A systems analyst at Great Buy believes that demand should be trending upward; thus, she wishes to evaluate the use of exponential smoothing with a trend model.

a. Use the first 5 weeks of data in Equations 3.36 and 3.37 to obtain estimates of aˆ and ˆ

b as of the end of week 5.

b. Using an α value of 0.15, employ exponential smoothing to update aˆ and ˆ

b and show the forecasts for weeks 6, 7, ... , 16 made at the start of each of these periods. Also, what is the forecast, made at the end of week 15, of the demand in week 20?