A Hybrid Forecasting Framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Artificial Neural Network

To enhance the competitive advantage in a constantly changing business environment, an enterprise management must make the right decision in many business activities based on both internal and external information. Thus, providing accurate information plays a prominent role in management's decision making. Intuitively, historical data can provide a feasible estimate through the forecasting models. Therefore, if the service department can estimate the service quantity for the next period, the service department can then effectively control the inventory of service related resources such as human, parts, and other facilities. In addition, the production department can make load map for improving its product quality. Therefore, obtaining an accurate service forecast most likely appears to be critical to manufacturing companies. Numerous investigations addressing this problem have generally employed statistical methods, such as regression or autoregressive and moving average simulation. However, these methods are only efficient for data with are seasonal or cyclical. If the data are influenced by the special characteristics of product, they are not feasible. In our research, we propose a forecasting framework that predicts service demand of manufacturing organization by combining Case-based reasoning (CBR) and leveraging an unsupervised artificial neural network based clustering analysis (i.e., Self-Organizing Maps; SOM). We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the service forecasting domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features : (1) We applied CBR and SOM in a new forecasting domain such as service demand forecasting. (2) We proposed our combined approach between CBR and SOM in order to overcome limitations of traditional statistical forecasting methods and We have developed a service forecasting tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and Case-based reasoning. In this research, we conducted an empirical study on a real digital TV manufacturer (i.e., Company A). In addition, we have empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real sales and service related data from digital TV manufacturer. In our empirical experiments, we intend to explore the performance of our proposed service forecasting framework when compared to the performances predicted by other two service forecasting methods; one is traditional CBR based forecasting model and the other is the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. We ran each service forecasting 144 times; each time, input data were randomly sampled for each service forecasting framework. To evaluate accuracy of forecasting results, we used Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as primary performance measure in our experiments. We conducted one-way ANOVA test with the 144 measurements of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches. For example, the F-ratio of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches is 67.25 and the p-value is 0.000. This means that the difference between the MAPE of the three different service forecasting approaches is significant at the level of 0.000. Since there is a significant difference among the different service forecasting approaches, we conducted Tukey's HSD post hoc test to determine exactly which means of MAPE are significantly different from which other ones. In terms of MAPE, Tukey's HSD post hoc test grouped the three different service forecasting approaches into three different subsets in the following order: our proposed approach > traditional CBR-based service forecasting approach > the existing forecasting approach used by Company A. Consequently, our empirical experiments show that our proposed approach outperformed the traditional CBR based forecasting model and the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some research background information such as summary of CBR and SOM. Section 3 presents a hybrid service forecasting framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Self-Organizing Maps, while the empirical evaluation results are summarized in Section 4. Conclusion and future research directions are finally discussed in Section 5.

사례기반 추론기법과 인공신경망을 이용한 서비스 수요예측 프레임워크

제조업에 있어서 판매 후 서비스 건수와 내용 등은 향후 서비스 제공을 위한 자원배분의 효율성 증진과 서비스 품질 향상을 위해서도 매우 중요한 정보이다. 따라서 기업들은 향후 발생하는 판매 후 서비스에 대해 정확히 예측하고 그에 따라 적절히 대처하는 능력을 확보할 필요성이 제조업을 중심으로 증가하고 있다. 그러나 실제로 이들 기업들이 활용하고 있는 서비스 수요예측 방법들은 전통적인 통계적인 예측기법이거나, 시뮬레이션을 기반한 기법들이다. 예를 들면, 전통적인 통계적인 예측기법으로는 회귀분석(regression analysis)의 경우, 다양한 제품모델에 대한 판매 후 서비스 발생 패턴이 선형적인 관계가 매우 적음에도 불구하고 선형으로 가정하여 추정한다는 점과 적정한 회귀식을 가정하여야 되며, 이러한 가정이 실제 경영환경에서는 매우 어렵다는 점 등이 기존의 예측기법들의 한계점으로 지적되고 있다. 본 연구에서는 디지털 TV 모델을 생산 판매 하는 A사의 사례연구를 통하여 최근 인공지능연구에서 각광을 받고 있는 사례기반추론(case-based reasoning; CBR) 기법을 활용한 서비스 수요예측 프레임워크를 제안하고자 한다. 또한, 사례기반추론에서 핵심적인 역할 중 하나인 유사 사례추출 방법에 있어서 가장 일반적인 nearest-neighbor 방법 이외의 유사 사례추출 방법을 제안하고자 한다. 특히, 본 연구에서 제안하는 유사 사례추출 방법은 인공신경망(artificial neural network)을 활용한 자기조직화지도(Self-Organizing Maps : SOM) 군집화 기법을 활용한 유사 사례추출 방식으로 이를 활용한 서비스 수요예측 프레임워크에 구현하고, 실제 기업의 판매 후 서비스 데이터를 활용하여 본 연구에서 제안하는 서비스 수요 예측 프레임워크의 유효성을 실증적으로 검증하고자 한다.