A Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Multi-Criteria Decision Support System for Textile Manufacturing Process Optimization

Textile manufacturing is a typical traditional industry involving high complexity in interconnected processes with limited capacity on the application of modern technologies. Decision-making in this domain generally takes multiple criteria into consideration, which usually arouses more complexity. To address this issue, the present paper proposes a decision support system that combines the intelligent data-based random forest (RF) models and a human knowledge based analytical hierarchical process (AHP) multi-criteria structure in accordance to the objective and the subjective factors of the textile manufacturing process. More importantly, the textile manufacturing process is described as the Markov decision process (MDP) paradigm, and a deep reinforcement learning scheme, the Deep Q-networks (DQN), is employed to optimize it. The effectiveness of this system has been validated in a case study of optimizing a textile ozonation process, showing that it can better master the challenging decision-making tasks in textile manufacturing processes.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2012.0110

Customer Analytics in Fashion Retail Industry

This paper aims to give an overview of customer analytics in fashion retail industry in the era of big data. Fashion retail industry has been facing significant challenges since last few years due to rapidly varying customer demands. Nowadays, customers are much more informed and connected because of social media and other channels on the Internet. They demand more personalized services, and perception is not sufficient to understand our customers. Therefore, we need data to understand our customers and meet their expectation. We will discuss how customer analytics can create value in fashion retail industry, strategies and methodology to examine the consumer data. Employing and investing in these methods and technologies, industry will benefit from improved revenues, improve in sales, higher customer retention rates and thereby it will sustain in the uncertain markets. Segments are created using recency value of the customers, and their future behavior is predicted using transition matrix

Analysis of consumer emotions about fashion brands: An exploratory study

Fashion products are characterized by high variability in terms of rapidly changing consumer preferences. Consumers express their emotions on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The main objective of this paper is to explore Twitter data for recognizing customer sentiments about fashion brands and to analyze their overall perception towards the brands. Two brands, Zara and Levis, are considered and users’ tweets related to these brands are analyzed using text mining and Naïve Bayes classifier. The results from this study suggest that social media such as Twitter can serve to be the repository of consumer sentiments and opinions. Sentiment analysis of the tweets can indicate fashion trend and thereby enable fashion brand companies to quickly respond to the ever changing consumer demands

Exploitation of Social Network Data for Forecasting Garment Sales

Growing use of social media such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., by consumers leads to the vast repository of consumer generated data. Collecting and exploiting these data has been a great challenge for clothing industry. This paper aims to study the impact of Twitter on garment sales. In this direction, we have collected tweets and sales data for one of the popular apparel brands for 6 months from April 2018 – September 2018. Lexicon Approach was used to classify Tweets by sentence using Naïve Bayes model applying enhanced version of Lexicon dictionary. Sentiments were extracted from consumer tweets, which was used to map the uncertainty in forecasting model. The results from this study indicate that there is a correlation between the apparel sales and consumer tweets for an apparel brand. “Social Media Based Forecasting (SMBF)” is designed which is a fuzzy time series forecasting model to forecast sales using historical sales data and social media data. SMBF was evaluated and its performance was compared with Exponential Forecasting (EF) model. SMBF model outperforms the EF model. The result from this study demonstrated that social media data helps to improve the forecasting of garment sales and this model could be easily integrated to any time series forecasting model

Forecasting New Apparel Sales Using Deep Learning and Nonlinear Neural Network Regression

Compared to other retail industries, fashion retail industry faces many challenges to foresee future demand of its products. This is due to ever-changing choices of their consumers, who get influenced by rapidly changing market trends and it leads to the short life cycle of a fashion product. Due to the advent of e-commerce business models, fashion retailers have to put a multitude of virtual product images along with their feature information on their websites in order for their customers to know the fashion products and improve their purchasing experience. It is imperative for fashion retailers to predict future consumer preferences in advance; however, they lack advanced tools to achieve this goal. To overcome this problem, this research work combines the historical information of products with their image features using deep learning and predicts future sales. Apparel images are converted into feature vectors and then are merged with historical sales data. We applied backward propagation neural network model to predict the sales of a new product. It is found that the model performs quite well despite the small size of the dataset. This approach could be promising for forecasting the new arrivals of apparels in the market, and fashion retailers could improve their efficiency and growth

Multi-Objective Optimization of the Textile Manufacturing Process Using Deep-Q-Network Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-objective optimization of the textile manufacturing process is an increasing challenge because of the growing complexity involved in the development of the textile industry. The use of intelligent techniques has been often discussed in this domain, although a significant improvement from certain successful applications has been reported, the traditional methods failed to work with high-as well as human intervention. Upon which, this paper proposed a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework to transform the optimization process into a stochastic game and introduced the deep Q-networks algorithm to train the multiple agents. A utilitarian selection mechanism was employed in the stochastic game, which (-greedy policy) in each state to avoid the interruption of multiple equilibria and achieve the correlated equilibrium optimal solutions of the optimizing process. The case study result reflects that the proposed MARL system is possible to achieve the optimal solutions for the textile ozonation process and it performs better than the traditional approaches