The Use of Recommender Systems in Demand Management in Intelligent Supply Chain Management
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The Use of Recommender Systems in Demand Management in Intelligent Supply Chain Management Qi Zhang A research paper submitted to University of Dublin, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science Interactive Digital Media 2018 I Declaration I have read and I understand the plagiarism provisions in the General Regulations of the University Calendar for the current year, found at: http://www.tcd.ie/calendar I have also completed the Online Tutorial on avoiding plagiarism ‘Ready, Steady, Write’, located at http://tcd- ie.libguides.com/plagiarism/ready-steady-write I declare that the work described in this research paper is, except where otherwise stated, entirely my own work and has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university. Signed: _________________________ Qi Zhang 10/05/2018 II Permission to lend and/or copy I agree that Trinity College Library may lend or copy this research paper upon request. Signed: _________________________ Qi Zhang 10/05/2018 III Acknowledgments I would sincerely like to thank my supervisor, Fatemeh Golpayegani, for all of her guidance and support throughout the process of completing this paper. IV Summary With the rapid development of internet technology, electronic commerce (e-commerce) has become a new development direction of the application of internet technology. E-commerce has the characteristics of opening, global, offering low cost and high efficiency services. The traditional supply chain cannot match the speed of the development of e-commerce, as a result, the intelligent supply chain management shows up and plays an important role in e-commerce. It not only uses internet as a method of communication, but also deeply excavate the potential application of internet throughout the whole process of e-commerce, such as strategic planning, inventory management, demand management and so on, by using electronic data interchange technology (EDI), inventory management technology, and recommender systems. In intelligent supply chain management, demand management predicts the demand using collected information from users’ behavior. For this reason, precise collection and analysis of information are quite necessary. This can be achieved by recommender systems, as they can collect data from users’ historical behavior and feedback, and then identify and recommend product or content to users that they are looking for in the front end. It is based on user interest and offers personalized services to users. With the help of recommender systems, the intelligent supply chain in e-commerce process can achieve a great improvement in efficiency. So, it is an important choice for the e-commerce-based enterprises to improve the sales ability of themselves and the loyalty from the users. This paper focuses on demand management in supply chain management, analyzing how recommender systems can affect the intelligent supply chain. Cases as Amazon, Alibaba are used to present explanations and make contrastive analysis. Based on theoretical exposition and case analysis, this paper discusses the concept of the recommender systems and their trend of development in the recent years, the problems appearing, and the potential solutions to the problems are put forward. V Table of Contents: Declaration ................................................................................................................................................................... II Permission to lend and/or copy .............................................................................................................................. III Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................................................... IV Summary ....................................................................................................................................................................... V Table of Contents: .................................................................................................................................................... VI List of Figures.......................................................................................................................................................... VIII List of Tables .............................................................................................................................................................. IX Chapter 1 - Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 - Literature review ................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1 E-commerce ...................................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1.1 Definition of e-commerce ..................................................................................................................... 3 2.1.2 Technologies used in e-commerce ...................................................................................................... 4 2.1.3 Features and development of e-commerce ........................................................................................ 4 2.2 Intelligent supply chain management ......................................................................................................... 5 2.2.1 Definition of SCM .................................................................................................................................. 6 2.2.2 Trend of development ............................................................................................................................ 6 2.2.3 Superiority of intelligent supply chain management ....................................................................... 7 2.3 Demand management ..................................................................................................................................... 8 2.3.1 Definition of demand management ..................................................................................................... 9 2.3.2 Evaluation of demand management .................................................................................................... 9 2.3.3 Importance of demand management .................................................................................................11 2.4 Recommender systems .................................................................................................................................12 2.4.1 Definition and background of recommender systems ...................................................................12 2.4.2 The operation mechanism of recommender systems ....................................................................13 2.4.3 Types of recommender systems .........................................................................................................15 2.4.4 Evaluation and comparison of the systems ......................................................................................22 2.4.5 The disadvantages and risks of recommender systems .................................................................25 Chapter 3 - Current development of recommender systems ...........................................................................26 VI 3.1 Recommender systems used in e-commerce ...........................................................................................27 3.2 Recommender systems used in Amazon ..................................................................................................28 3.3 Recommender systems used in Alibaba ...................................................................................................29 3.4 Comparison of RSs between Amazon and Alibaba ...............................................................................32 3.5 Functions of RSs used in e-commerce .....................................................................................................36 Chapter 4 - Conclusion and future work .............................................................................................................38 4.1 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................38 4.2 Future of recommender systems ................................................................................................................39 References ..................................................................................................................................................................41 VII List of Figures Figure 2-1 Demand management communication process………………………………… 10 Figure 2-2 Components in a recommender system………………………………………… 14 Figure 2-3 Data flow in recommender models……………………………………………... 14 Figure 2-4 Types of Recommender systems………………………………………………... 15 Figure 2-5 Collaborative filtering recommender…………………………………………… 16 Figure 2-6 Content-based filtering recommender…………………………………………... 19 Figure 2-7 Association rule-based recommender…………………………………………… 20 VIII List of Tables Table 2-1 Advantages and disadvantages of main recommender systems……………………23 Table 2-2 Comparison of different Recommender systems…………………………………...24 Table 3-1 The main use of RSs in different