COVID-19 Effect on Supply and Demand of Essential Commodities using Unsupervised Learning Method

J. Inst. Eng. India Ser. B https://doi.org/10.1007/s40031-021-00594-6 REVIEW PAPER COVID-19 Effect on Supply and Demand of Essential Commodities using Unsupervised Learning Method P. Anitha1,2 • Malini M. Patil1,2 • Rekha B. Venkatapur2,3 Received: 14 August 2020 / Accepted: 12 April 2021 Ó The Institution of Engineers (India) 2021 Abstract The affliction caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic is diverse from other disasters seen so far. Supply chain industries are facing unique challenges in fulfilling the essential needs of the people. The objective of the paper is to analyze the supply and demand of essentials during pre-pandemic and post-pandemic lockdowns using machine learning algorithms. This helps for supply chain industries in forecasting and managing the supply and demand of essential stocks for the future. Data are analyzed using prediction algorithms to check the actual and predicted values. The clustering algorithm along with rolling mean is used for half-yearly data of 2019 and 2020 to identify the sales of different categories of essential commodities. This paper aims at applying intelligence in predicting various categories of sales by providing timely information for B2B Industries during the time of disasters. Keywords Pandemic  Essential data  Forecasting  Prediction  Business intelligence & P. Anitha 1 Department of Information Science & Engineering, JSS Academy of Technical Education, Bengaluru 560060, India 2 Visveswaraya Technological University, Belgaum, Karnataka 590018, India 3 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, KS Institute of Technology, Bengaluru 560060, India Introduction The pandemic is causing a high impact on the supply chain industries, which includes manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers [1] all over the globe. Economically, affected countries are facing challenges related to the supply chain for transportation of essentials [2]. COVID-19 also affects the supply chain related to health care [3]. It causes suspension of retail trade, save for essential goods for sustainability (including medicines, food, and their supply chains) with financial, banking, and insurance services [4]. Industries are facing challenges in the supply chain for transportation of goods, especially essential grocery items during this COVID-19 and problem related to suppliers [3]. The challenging task faced by supply chain industries during a pandemic is predicting demand and supply, transportation issues, manpower issues, and government regulations. Managing these issues within and between the state has increased the attention of researchers toward the supply chain [5]. This type of disaster impacts mainly on customer behavior and preferences. Under this prevailing situation, customers are increasingly working out on what, where, and how the essential commodities are bought. Since the demand for essential commodities increases, industries are concentrating more on their supply chain for secure and immediate operations. At the same time, insight into the other categories of consumer needs also offers a preference on the consumer side. A literature survey reveals that it is the consumer-driven business that needs to address from a supply chain perspective. Few facts to be engrossed for further analysis are summarized as follows. 1. Demand and supply During this pandemic, companies are started facing huge demand for essential 123 J. Inst. Eng. India Ser. B commodities which is not expected. This leads to a great challenge for the supply chain department. Also, it is difficult for Suppliers to arrange for such a huge demand. A contingency plan has been developed to take part in the supply of essential goods. 2. Manpower (labor issues) since lockdowns are unplanned, it created a serious issue on lack of manpower. So supply and demand depend on the manpower. 3. Maintaining safety Another important challenge includes the safety of food items [6] and also the safety of people involved in transportation concerning SOP. It is important to check the safety while delivering the essentials and applications of disinfectants for surfaces and vehicles. Also, thermal checks and sanitizers for people delivering the goods. Based on the service and policy environment Responsible Transportation is started with post-pandemic [7]. 4. Government Regulations It is important to know the reaction of the government rules and regulations which disturbs the supply chain, also to check whether alternative suppliers are available at a moment’s notice. To overcome the above issues, statutory bodies can inform the government and started receiving the e-passes for their transportation purpose. This leads to having better control over demand and supply of essentials. Literature Survey In recent years, both national and global level supply chain risk management attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners [5]. Big data and machine learning approaches help in the detection of emerging risks, maintenance of relevant reports, and initiate suitable actions for a reformation of the supply chain [5]. Using analytics, supply chain issues like track and trace, route optimization, Green Logistics can be resolved [8]. During this pandemic, the supply chain has struggled for a steady flow of essential goods. So, the author discussed demand and supply challenges, technological challenges, and supply chain sustainability faced during COVID-19 [1]. Supply chain disruptions are unavoidable, and it is difficult to match supply and demand [9]. The safety of food is another challenge in the field of the supply chain. The difficulties faced in each critical stage of the food supply chain, from farm to consumer has been explained and measures initiated to overcome these problems [6]. While the impact of COVID-19 is increasing, reduction measures are taken to reduce the risk across the countries also increases [4]. COVID-19 disaster affects the 123 supply chain related to health care, since the sudden rise in the demand for specific health care products [3]. Here, health care equipment is considered as a product. K-means is used to cluster the customer purchase based on their RFM values [10]. In future work, it is mentioned that Kmeans can be used to cluster product-wise sales for the given data [10]. Forecasting sales is another important segment of Business Intelligence [11]. Time series forecasting is used for validating the sales results obtained from the predictive machine learning models [11]. Machine learning algorithms not only involved in decision-making, but also improves the performance of analysis [12, 13]. Because of the pandemic, transportation policies are reframed to solve the issues related to existing approaches [7]. Linear regression is used to predict and compare the sales of a month [8]. Many research areas have been emerged in describing and solving the issues related to COVID-19. Few are supply chain, health care, economic, information technology, sus (...truncated)