Artificial Intelligence In Logistics: Applications And Ethical Considerations

Case Study

Information technology can be defined as the significant utilization of several computers and systems for the purpose of storing, retrieving, transmitting as well as manipulating the information or data within the context of an enterprise of business (Russell & Norvig, 2016, p. 4). This information technology is majorly considered as the subset of ICT. The numerous services or products that are associated with the information technology are computer software, hardware, semiconductors, telecom equipment, the Internet connection, electronic commerce and many more. Artificial intelligence or AI is the best boon of information technology. AI or machine intelligence is the significant intelligence that is depicted by machines and is different from natural intelligence that is being displayed by the human beings or even animals (Michalski, Carbonell & Mitchell, 2013, p. 2). The discovery of proofs for the playing of chess or mathematical theorems with greater proficiency is one of the best examples of artificial intelligence.

The following report outlines a brief description regarding the broad concept of artificial intelligence and the various applications of AI. This particular technology has a strong impact on the technological world and users. Better innovation is possible with the help of this technology. ABC Ltd is a popular logistics organization in Australia and is responsible for providing end to end logistics services to other organizations. They have now decided to include services of artificial intelligence. This report will be demonstrating five types of AI applications for this organization and will be proposing three of those applications. Finally relevant recommendations will be given here.

ABC Ltd is a large logistics company in Australia that was found around 20 years ago. Now the organization is working with more than 200 staffs and the head office of this company is in Sydney; however ABC Ltd is operating in several states of Australia and all parts in the Oceania region. This particular organization of ABC Ltd helps in providing end to end logistics solutions to a larger number of organizations that involve manufacturing, mining and warehousing. Some of the client organizations are eventually expanding and they wishes to provide logistical solutions on the basis of artificial intelligence. For this purpose, ABC Ltd is exploring various options for expanding the business in next five years for involving the services on the basis of artificial intelligence. The CEO of this company has given the responsibility to the Head of ICT for investigating the technology as well as the applications for providing services within the industries of warehousing, mining and manufacturing.

Definition of Artificial Intelligence

AI or artificial intelligence can be defined as the core ability of the computer controlled robots or digital computers for the performance of tasks that are majorly associated with the intelligent human beings (Nilsson, 2014, p. 3). This type of artificial intelligence is significantly applied to the program to develop various systems, which are endowed with intellectual procedure feature of the human beings like the reasoning ability, discovering as well as generalizing meaning and even learning from the previous experiences. The human flexibility is matched over the wide domains for needing more knowledge (Wenger, 2014, p. 7). Some of the programs have achieved the significant performance level of human expert as well as professionals for the performance of certain tasks. Since, it is the simulation of the human intelligence process by the computer systems.  

There are various applications of artificial intelligence that are utilized by several industries in Australia as well as other parts of the world (Hovy, Navigli & Ponzetto, 2013, p. 21). These applications of the artificial intelligence comprise of several developments related to the logistics based solutions. The few applications of the artificial intelligence are given below:

1. Expert Systems: The first and the foremost application of artificial intelligence is the expert systems. Within AI, the expert system is the computerized system, which could be emulating the core capability of decision making of any specific human expert. The expert system is designed for the solving complicated problems by the reasoning via certain knowledge bodies (Bond & Gasser, 2014, p. 5). These are represented as the basic if then rule instead of conventional procedural codes. The expert systems are the most successful forms of artificial intelligence technology. There are two sub systems of an expert system, which are the knowledge base and the inference engine. Knowledge base is responsible for representing the rules and facts, whereas, inference engine is responsible for applying certain rules to all the known facts for deducing new facts. These inference engines could eventually involve the major abilities of debugging as well as explanation. There are two modes of the inference engine that are forward chaining and backward chaining (Steels & Brooks, 2018, p. 3). The various approaches could be dictated by the inference engine and is being driven by the antecedents. The expert system is also one of the basic examples of the knowledge based system. Since, this is the computer program for utilizing the technologies of artificial intelligence for simulating the behaviour as well as judgment of the organization or human being, which comprises of the expert experience and knowledge within the specific field. A set of rules is present to apply the respective knowledge base for each and every situation for program description. The current systems subsequently involve the capabilities of machine learning for allowing these systems for improving the performance on the basis of experience, similar to the human beings (Charniak, Riesbeck, McDermott & Meehan, 2014, p. 4). The expert system application has a strong impact within the industry of logistics.
2. Computer Vision: The second popular application of the artificial intelligence is the computer vision. This particular application majorly deals with the core procedure of computers gaining the high level understanding from the digitalized images as well as videos. The tasks could be automated easily that the human visual systems would be executed eventually (Gero, 2014, p. 2). The application of computer vision comprises of few methodologies like the processing, acquiring, understanding and analyzing of digital images and then finally extracting the higher dimensional information or data from the proper production of symbolic or numerical information within the major form of decision. The subsequent transformation of the visualized images is possible with this application for the interference with thought processes or appropriate activities. The sub domains of this computer vision application majorly involve 3D pose estimation, image restoration, object recognition, video tracking, image restoration, learning, event detection, indexing and finally scene reconstruction (Ghahramani, 2015, p. 452). This is extremely effective for the logistics industry since the users could easily track the other rival companies and detect the events. Moreover, the motion of the products could also be estimated and hence a faster delivery is possible.
3. Speech Recognition: The third popular and significant application of the artificial intelligence technology is the speech recognition. This is the core capability of any program or machine that helps in the proper identification of words or phrases within the spoken language and finally converting them to the respective machine readable format (Copeland, 2015, p. 3). The software of rudimentary speech recognition consists of the limited vocabulary of phrases and words and it might only recognize those when they are being spoken with extreme clarity. The sophisticated software has the major ability for accepting natural speech of human beings. The working procedure of speech recognition is that it utilizes certain algorithms by language modelling as well as acoustic modelling. The language modelling subsequently matches sounds with the word sequences for helping to distinguish within similar sounds (Imran, Castillo, Lucas, Meier & Vieweg, 2014, p. 160). The acoustic modelling is responsible for representing the relation within audio signals and linguistic speech units. This would be extremely vital and effective for the logistics industry since the organizations would be getting performance on the basis of speed and accuracy.
4. Video Manipulation: Another popular and significant application of the artificial intelligence is the video manipulation. This is the new variety of the media manipulation, which eventually targets the digital video with the help of amalgamation of the techniques of video editing and video processing as well as the auxiliary methods such as face recognition from AI (Dartnall, 2013, p. 6). These results subsequently range from the artistic videos that are being produced for the aesthetic effects to videos for propaganda and mass manipulation. Apart from the computer aided possibilities, it is been recommended that the unrealistic frequency of any product’s motion could serve as the major hint for recognizing the fake videos. The logistics industry has to take the video of the products before sending them to the clients and hence this is effective for them.
5. Optical Character Recognition: This is the mechanical conversion of the image of any product or item and hence identifying the printed text into machine encoded texts from the scanned documents or from any type of subtitle text that is being superimposed on the images (Kanal & Lemmer, 2014, p. 2). This particular application of artificial intelligence is being utilized as the basic form of the information entry from all printed paper data records and is utilized within the machine processes like the machine translation, text mining, cognitive computing, text to speech and finally key data. The optical character recognition is the field of research within pattern recognition and computer vision.

The major examples of Australian organizations that are using AI are Telstra, Woolworths, Daisee, Lisa, Flamingo and many more. These organizations have obtained better efficiency and effectiveness from the implementation of artificial intelligence. The logistics Australian companies like Glen Cameron Group, AirRoad, SCT Logistics and many others have involved AI applications in their businesses for gaining competitive advantages.

The proposed three artificial intelligence based applications for the logistics organization of ABC Ltd for their expansion in next five years are given below:

I) Expert System: The first and the foremost proposed application of artificial intelligence for ABC Ltd is expert system. These are computer applications that are being designed to solve the problems on any specific domain (Brown, 2014, p.4).

The most relevant and accurate knowledge from the human experts could be stored within the computer memory and hence serving the knowledge that is being served by this system whenever required. The expert system is extremely effective for the logistics industry. There are various advantages and disadvantages of this application.

1. The advantages of expert system for ABC Ltd are given below:
2. Consistency: Since, expert system is a completely computer based system, the logic and knowledge are programmed within it. Hence, decision making is extremely easier.
3. Memory: The next advantage of this application is that there is a huge amount of memory for storing the large amount of data and could be easily accessed by the users. Memory loss is almost impossible here (Imran et al., 2014, p. 162).
4. Easy Accessibility: The data could be easily extracted from this particular application and hence ABC Ltd could easily access the data.
5.  The disadvantages of expert system are as follows:
6. Integrity of Data: The expert system does not promise data integrity and hence data is often changed or altered.
7. Time and Cost: Expert system takes up more time than required and the costs are also higher (Ghahramani, 2015, p. 452).
8. Specified Domain: The third disadvantage of the expert system in ABC Ltd is that the expert system could only work in one specified domain.

Five Different Types of Applications of Artificial Intelligence with Examples

II) Computer Vision: This is the next significant application of AI for ABC Ltd. It is the method as well as technology for the purpose of providing image based automatic inspection or analysis for the applications like automatic inspection, robot guidance and process control (Hovy, Navigli & Ponzetto, 2013, p. 18). For the logistics industry, it is highly effective and efficient.

1. The advantages of computer vision for ABC Ltd are given below:
2. Persistence: It is extremely persistent a non destructive for the rapid speed it possesses.
3. Cost Effective: Computer vision is extremely cost effective and hence could be afforded by everyone.
4. Human Visual Involvement: The third advantage of computer vision is that it allows human visual involvement.
5. The disadvantages of computer vision for ABC Ltd are given below:
6. Lack of Sensitivity: There is lack of sensitivity within the computer vision AI application and hence it is not always feasible (Michalski, Carbonell & Mitchell, 2013, p. 5).
7. Requirement of Expert Labours:  There is always a requirement of the expert labours within this application and thus is a major disadvantage of computer vision.

III) Speech Recognition: The final application of artificial intelligence for ABC Ltd is the speech recognition. It matches the speech of the users and could easily recognize the person easily and promptly.

1. The advantages of speech recognition for ABC Ltd are given below:
2. Easy and Prompt: Speech recognition is extremely fast and hence is used by the users.
3. Lack of Training: No training is required for using the AI based application.
4. The disadvantages of speech recognition for ABC Ltd are given below:
5. More Errors: This application provides more errors in the output of the application.
6. Uses Lot of Memory: Speech recognition uses excess memory for the utilization of this application (Nilsson, 2014, p. 5).

Conclusion

Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that artificial intelligence is the significant simulation of the procedures of human intelligence by various machines like the computer systems. All of these procedures majorly involve reasoning, learning as well as self correction. The cognitive functions are associated with the human minds like the problem solving and learning. The significant scope of the artificial intelligence is completely disputed, since the machines are becoming extremely capable and the tasks are considered as requiring intelligence and are removed from the effect of artificial intelligence. There are several applications of this technology that are utilized by the users. The major impact of this technology is found on the organizations and users of information technology. A continuous advancement is required for controlling the computer processing speed or the memory capacity. There are various applications of the artificial intelligence such as machine vision, speech recognition and the expert systems. These applications have provided major benefits to the users. The above report has properly outlined the importance of artificial intelligence for the popular logistics organization of ABC Ltd. This particular organization eventually provides several logistics solutions to its clients and hence is termed as one of the most popular and significant logistics company in Australia. This report has significantly described the several and different types of applications in artificial intelligence and three distinct applications amongst them three are being proposed for this particular organization. Moreover, relevant and suitable recommendations are also provided in this report for ABC Ltd.

The most significant and relevant recommendations for the involvement of applications of artificial intelligence of ABC Ltd are given below:

1. The first and the foremost recommendation for the organization of ABC Ltd is that they should use computer vision application for their expansion of business. This particular application deals with the process of gaining higher level understanding from the digital images and digitalized videos. They would be able to acquire, process, analyze and even extract higher dimensional data from the real world for the purpose of producing symbolic and numerical information for taking the decisions. They would be able to expand their business easily after gaining proper information about the other organizations.
2. Utilization of expert systems is the next recommendation for ABC Ltd. This would help them to emulate the basic ability to take relevant decisions of any human expert. The expert system helps in solving the complex problems by proper reasoning and thus they would be benefitted from this application.
3. The third relevant recommendation for the organization of ABC Ltd is that even before releasing the system of AI, the organization must run the release trials for ensuring that the errors and biases are not amplified for the various issues related to algorithms, system design elements and training data.

References

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