Deep Learning Based Customer Preferences Analysis in Industry 4.0 Environment

Customer preferences analysis and modelling using deep learning in edge computing environment are critical to enhance customer relationship management that focus on a dynamically changing market place. Existing forecasting methods work well with often seen and linear demand patterns but become less accurate with intermittent demands in the catering industry. In this paper, we introduce a throughput deep learning model for both short-term and long-term demands forecasting aimed at allowing catering businesses to be highly efficient and avoid wastage. Moreover, detailed data collected from a business online booking system in the past three years have been used to train and verify the proposed model. Meanwhile, we carefully analyzed the seasonal conditions as well as past local or national events (event analysis) that could have had critical impact on the sales. The results are compared with the best performing forecast methods Xgboost and autoregressive moving average model (ARMA), and they suggest that the proposed method significantly improves demand forecasting accuracy (up to 80%) for dishes demand along with reduction in associated costs and labor allocation.

Tourism demand forecasting using stacking ensemble model with adaptive fuzzy combiner

Over the last decades, several soft computing techniques have been applied to tourism demand forecasting. Among these techniques, a neuro-fuzzy model of ANFIS (adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system) has started to emerge. A conventional ANFIS model cannot deal with the large dimension of a dataset, and cannot work with our dataset, which is composed of a 62 time-series, as well. This study attempts to develop an ensemble model by incorporating neural networks with ANFIS to deal with a large number of input variables for multivariate forecasting. Our proposed approach is a collaboration of two base learners, which are types of the neural network models and a meta-learner of ANFIS in the framework of the stacking ensemble. The results show that the stacking ensemble of ANFIS (meta-learner) and ANN models (base learners) outperforms its stand-alone counterparts of base learners. Numerical results indicate that the proposed ensemble model achieved a MAPE of 7.26% compared to its single-instance ANN models with MAPEs of 8.50 and 9.18%, respectively. Finally, this study which is a novel application of the ensemble systems in the context of tourism demand forecasting has shown better results compared to those of the single expert systems based on the artificial neural networks.

Recursive Neural Network-Based Market Demand Forecasting Algorithm for Calligraphy Practice Products

In today’s society, calligraphy, which reflects one’s basic writing skills, is becoming more and more important to people. People are influenced by calligraphy in their studies, work, etc. Improving calligraphy writing skills has become one of the key directions for developing one’s abilities at this stage. As an important means of improving writing skills, calligraphy practice products are attracting more and more attention and purchases. In particular, in recent years, as the market economy has developed in a deeper direction, people’s demand for calligraphy practice products has diversified and calligraphy practice product companies have launched a variety of products to meet the public’s calligraphy practice needs in order to adapt to the reality of consumer demand. However, with the development of the Internet culture industry and influenced by objective factors such as school holidays and seasons, the current market demand for calligraphy practice products is rapidly and dynamically changing, making market changes difficult to grasp and leading to poor sales, which directly affects the profits of calligraphy practice product-related companies. The artificial intelligence neural network method realizes the nonlinear relationship between the input and output of sample data through the self-learning ability of each neuron and has a certain nonlinear mapping ability in prediction, which plays a great role in the market demand prediction of many commercial products. Based on this, this paper proposes a recursive neural network-based algorithm to predict the future demand and development trend of calligraphy practice products through extensive and in-depth research, so as to provide positive and beneficial guidance for enterprises’ future production and sales.

Household appliance usage recommendation based on demand forecasting and multi­objective optimization

Accelerated population growth in the 21st century and increased demand for energy sources, associated with climate change, have resulted in two main challenges: the search for sustainable energy sources and the need to find more efficient ways to use extant sustainable sources. The forecasting module provides an estimate of the future usage of these appliances and it is the source of the recommended module’s suggestion. Time Series Forecasting techniques, such as Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average, Long­Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units, Echo State Networks (ESN), and Support Vector Regression, were tested for the predictive module. Multi­objective optimization techniques such as Non­Sorted Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA II), Multi­Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO), Speed constrained Multi-­objective Particle Swarm Optimization (SMOPSO), and Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm two (SPEA2), for example, were tested for the Recommendation Module. The Forecasting and Recommendation module experiments were performed independently. In the Forecasting Module, the results and statistical tests revealed LSTM as the best­ suited technique for forecasting the loads of the majority of the appliances tested (in this case seven) in terms of root mean square error. In the experiments performed for the recommendation module, NSGA II showed a higher overall performance compared to other metrics in terms of hyper volume of the Pareto Front generated. This work presents the potential of using both Predictive Models and Multi­Objective Optimization Techniques combined to reduce energy usage in household environments.

Computational Performance Analysis of Neural Network and Regression Models in Forecasting the Societal Demand for Agricultural Food Harvests

Demand forecasting plays an important role in the field of agriculture, where a farmer can plan for the crop production according to the demand in future and make a profitable crop business. There exist a various statistical and machine learning methods for forecasting the demand, selecting the best forecasting model is desirable. In this work, a multiple linear regression (MLR) and an artificial neural network (ANN) model have been implemented for forecasting an optimum societal demand for various food crops that are commonly used in day to day life. The models are implemented using R toll, linear model and neuralnet packages for training and optimization of the MLR and ANN models. Then, the results obtained by the ANN were compared with the results obtained with MLR models. The results obtained indicated that the designed models are useful, reliable, and quite an effective tool for optimizing the effects of demand prediction in controlling the supply of food harvests to match the societal needs satisfactorily.

A crowdsourced dynamic repositioning strategy for public bike sharing systems

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Public bike sharing systems have become the most popular shared economy application in transportation. The convenience of this system depends on the availability of bikes and empty racks. One of the major challenges in operating a bike sharing system is the repositioning of bikes between rental sites to maintain sufficient bike inventory in each station at all times. Most systems hire trucks to conduct dynamic repositioning of bikes among rental sites. We have analyzed a commonly used repositioning scheme and have demonstrated its ineffectiveness. To realize a higher quality of service, we proposed a crowdsourced dynamic repositioning strategy: first, we analyzed the historical rental data via the random forest algorithm and identified important factors for demand forecasting. Second, considering 30-minute periods, we calculated the optimal bike inventory via integer programming for each rental site in each time period with a sufficient crowd for repositioning bikes. Then, we proposed a minimum cost network flow model in a time-space network for calculating the optimal voluntary rider flows for each period based on the current bike inventory, which is adjusted according to the forecasted demands. The results of computational experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our crowdsourced repositioning strategy may reduce unmet rental demands by more than 30% during rush hours compared to conventional trucks.</p>

Improvement of Resource Utilisation Through Forecasting, Planning, and Information Flow

Demand forecasting and production planning are challenging issues when working to supply perishable goods to fulfil supermarket requirements as opposed to dry goods that can be manufactured and have a fixed storage life. The focus of this report is on the improvement of resource utilisation through better forecasting, planning, and information flow. There is a fluctuation for labour demand within the processing function; controlling the number of staff daily is vital to the efficient running of production and waste reduction. It is the belief for the management that left unchecked the production planners can tend to overorder staff as a contingency.