Optimizing Smart Retail by Experiment using an Online AI Model Exploration Interface

Smart retail technologies save grocery store operators a lot of work. At the same time, these technologies produce valuable data for building sustainable and economical inventory management strategies. AI models can be trained for sales forecasting using the data. The forecasts support the provisioning of fresh food over the whole week and help reducing food waste. In this paper, we present a Web portal which we developed to allow grocery store operators experiments with AI models revealing interrelations between observed and anticipated customer behavior. Clickable diagrams facilitate the exploration of data sets combining historical data and synthetically generated data. Pricing and ordering can be adapted accordingly to the simulated forecasts. By means of a case study, we show that our simulations are not only useful for predicting future sales but for other smart retail tasks as well.