Artificial Intelligence in Chemical Industry - III : Anticipation

Part I

Part 2

Anticipation

e-commerce juggernaut Amazon patented “anticipatory shipping”, a system which helps them to predict what customers are going to buy before they actually order. Let us imagine a similar scenario in chemical industry. A fertiliser company manufactures 3 crop-specific product grades. The company’s product slate mirrors the likely cropping pattern, which in turn is largely influenced by the rainfall prediction. Each year the company management plans to make the 3 grades in a proportion that is primarily determined by the long-term rainfall forecast issued by the meteorological department. Because the experts of the recommendation committee invariably fail to arrive at a consensus, the final decision is always a compromise of their subjective opinions. Farmers in turn do not rely completely on the forecasts put out, but supplement the information with their own gut feeling before deciding what to sow. An AI based system using historical inputs can be trusted to provide a more objective recommendation in this case. AI based system will help the company management to stay abreast with the farmer’s mind and improve its bottom-line. Such AI based production planning can be profitably adopted for most agrochemicals, whose consumption depends on nature’s vagaries.