Fog computing enabled locality based product demand prediction and decision making using reinforcement learning

Wastage of perishable and non-perishable products due to manual monitoring in shopping malls creates huge revenue loss in supermarket industry. Besides, internal and external factors such as calendar events and weather condition contribute to excess wastage of products in different regions of supermarket. It is a challenging job to know about the wastage of the products manually in different supermarkets region-wise. Therefore, the supermarket management needs to take appropriate decision and action to prevent the wastage of products. The fog computing data centers located in each region can collect, process and analyze data for demand prediction and decision making. In this paper, a product-demand prediction model is designed using integrated Principal Compo-nent Analysis (PCA) and K-means Unsupervised Learning (UL) algorithms and a decision making model is developed using State-Action-Reward-State-Action (SARSA) Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm. Our proposed method can cluster the products into low, medium, and high-demand product by learning from the designed features. Taking the derived cluster model, decision making for distributing low-demand to high-demand product can be made using SARSA. Experimental results show that our proposed method can cluster the datasets well with a Silhouette score of ≥ 60%. Besides, our adopted SARSA-based decision making model outperforms over Q-Learning, Monte-Carlo, Deep Q-Network (DQN), and Actor-Critic algorithms in terms of maximum cumulative reward, average cumulative reward and execution time.