Restock Copilot Lite

Restock Copilot Lite is an inventory forecasting tool designed to tell small shops what to reorder and why, without relying on external cloud APIs or expensive GPU clusters. The system tests three forecasting methods (4-week baseline, seasonal, and smoothed trend) on 105 weeks of UK retail data to predict demand for 30 products over an 8-week pre-Christmas simulation. The simulation selected the smoothed method based on a strict pre-agreed rule of lowest forecast error (0.5077), though unmet demand results were mixed. To meet the AMD hardware requirement securely, we eliminated live API dependencies. Plain-language explanations for all restocking actions were generated offline using the open-source Qwen/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct model running via PyTorch purely on the CPU of an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS laptop. The FastAPI backend serves these static, pre-computed outputs, falling back to a factual template if a check fails. The language model does not forecast, and the stock mentioned in explanations is strictly simulated.