ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS FOR SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

Abstract

In simple words a supply chain is getting the raw materials, converting them into a finished product and delivering that to the end customer. The product can be tangible (a good) or intangible (a service) or even a combination of both. Basically it is the process of manufacturing and delivering. Supply chain management is simply handling the supply chain in order to have optimum outputs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most modern form of machine learning and is what is considered as a hot topic of research in today’s world. Simply put, AI is mimicking the human intelligence and reactions that would happen in a given situation. Artificial Intelligence is a booming field and so is Supply Chain Management, and in recent years researchers and companies such as consultancy firms have been trying to integrate both together in order to have optimum supply chains either for themselves or for their client(s).

In this report, we’ll be having an introduction to the fields of supply chain and artificial intelligence coming together, learning about previous studies where this combined concept has been worked upon, talking about various machine learning techniques for model creation, working on a real world supply chain shipment data set using the deep learning tool of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) using the Python programming language for creating a prediction model and interpreting the results derived such as model accuracy.