Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Analyzing market and technology trends with NLP and semantic-web technologies
As the mobility transition continues, transport operators and energy providers such as VAG and N-ERGIE face the question of which drive technology will prevail for buses. Are electric buses really the latest trend? Electric buses and the infrastructure that supports them call for massive investment – the buses have a service life of more than a decade. So when companies are drafting their investment strategy, it is important for them to recognize relevant developments early on so that they can avoid making bad decisions. Our data-based trend and scenario analysis provides us with an automated way of tapping all kinds of media sources to infer trends relating to technological developments and market shifts around the world covering a vast array of topics. This means that companies can always be up to speed.
We use AI-supported text processing to identify trends: every week, we automatically collect thousands of communications about electromobility and analyze them to see where reports about test runs and rollouts of battery-powered electric buses are coming from and who is publishing them. Using a combination of machine-based natural language processing (NLP) and semantic-web technologies, we extract the relevant information relating to aspects such as bus manufacturers, powertrain technologies, transport companies and operation sites from the unstructured text media data. Business intelligence tools make it possible to perform specific analyses on an ad hoc basis. This in turn allows companies to base strategic decisions on the facts.