Knowing the prices of agricultural commodities in advance can provide governments, farmers, and consumers with various advantages, including a clearer understanding of the market, planning business strategies, and adjusting personal finances. Thus, there have been many efforts to predict the future prices of agricultural commodities in the past. For example, researchers have attempted to predict prices by extracting price quotes, using sentiment analysis algorithms, through statistical information from news stories, and by other means. In this paper, we propose a methodology that predicts the daily retail price of pork in the South Korean domestic market based on news articles by incorporating deep learning and topic modeling techniques. To do this, we utilized news articles and retail price data from 2010 to 2019. We initially applied a topic modeling technique to obtain relevant keywords that can express price fluctuations. Based on these keywords, we constructed prediction models using statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods. The experimental results show that there is a strong relationship between the meaning of news articles and the price of pork.

The large amount of programmable logic controller (PLC) sensing data has rapidly increased in the manufacturing environment. Therefore, a large data store is necessary for Big Data platforms. In this paper, we propose a Hadoop ecosystem for the support of many features in the manufacturing industry. In this ecosystem, Apache Hadoop and HBase are used as Big Data storage and handle large scale data. In addition, Apache Kafka is used as a data streaming pipeline which contains many configurations and properties that are used to make a better-designed environment and a reliable system, such as Kafka offset and partition, which is used for program scaling purposes. Moreover, Apache Spark closely works with Kafka consumers to create a real-time processing and analysis of the data. Meanwhile, data security is applied in the data transmission phase between the Kafka producers and consumers. Public-key cryptography is performed as a security method which contains public and private keys. Additionally, the public-key is located in the Kafka producer, and the private-key is stored in the Kafka consumer. The integration of these above technologies will enhance the performance and accuracy of data storing, processing, and securing in the manufacturing environment.

It is believed that the huge amount of information delivered to the consumers through mass media, including television and social networks, may affect consumers’ behavior. The purpose of this study was to forecast the amount required to purchase pork belly meat by using unstructured data such as broadcast news, TV programs/shows and social network as well as structured data such as consumer panel data, retail and wholesale prices and production outputs in order to prove that mass media data release can occur ahead of actual economic activities and consumer behavior can be predicted by using these data. By using structured and unstructured data from 2010 to 2016 and five forecasting algorithms (autoregressive exogenous model and vector error correction model for time series, gradient boosting and random forest for machine learning, and long short-term memory for recurrent neural network), the amounts required to purchase pork belly meat in 2017 were forecasted and compared with the actual amounts to validate model accuracy. Our findings suggest that when unstructured data were combined with structured data, the forecast pattern is improved. To date, our study is the first report that forecasts the demand of pork meat by using structured and unstructured data.

In the manufacturing industry, the process capability index (Cpk) measures the level and capability required to improve the processes. However, the Cpk is not enough to represent the process capability and performance of the manufacturing processes. In other words, considering that the smart manufacturing environment can accommodate the big data collected from various facilities, we need to understand the state of the process by comprehensively considering diverse factors contained in the manufacturing. In this paper, a two-stage method is proposed to analyze the process quality performance (PQP) and predict future process quality. First, we propose the PQP as a new measure for representing process capability and performance, which is defined by a composite statistical process analysis of such factors as manufacturing cycle time analysis, process trajectory of abnormal detection, statistical process control analysis, and process capability control analysis. Second, PQP analysis results are used to predict and estimate the stability of the production process using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, which is a deep learning algorithm-based method. The present work compares the LSTM prediction model with the random forest, autoregressive integrated moving average, and artificial neural network models to convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Notably, the LSTM model achieved higher accuracy than the other models.

Product quality is a major concern in manufacturing. In the metal processing industry, low-quality products must be remanufactured, which requires additional labor, money, and time. Therefore, user-controllable variables for machines and raw material compositions are key factors for ensuring product quality. In this study, we propose a method for generating the time-series working patterns of the control variables for metal-melting induction furnaces and continuous casting machines, thus improving product quality by aiding machine operators. We used an auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (AC-GAN) model to generate time-series working patterns of two processes depending on product type and additional material data. To check accuracy, the difference between the generated time-series data of the model and the ground truth data was calculated. Specifically, the proposed model results were compared with those of other deep learning models: multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU). It was demonstrated that the proposed model outperformed the other deep learning models. Moreover, the proposed method generated different time-series data for different inputs, whereas the other deep learning models generated the same time-series data.