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Autonomous Retailing: A Frontier for Cyber-Physical-Human Systems

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Principles of Modeling

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10760))

Abstract

Retail is one of the largest economic sectors, accounting for almost $5 trillion in sales in the US alone. With the proliferation of e-commerce, mobile devices, and digitally engaging shopping journeys, retail is going through profound transformations that will change everyone’s life. The future of retail will inevitably integrate online and in-store shopping, and promises to enhance customers’ shopping experience. Physical stores, which still account for 85% of retail sales, and 95% of grocery sales, must be repositioned to coexist with online and mobile shopping channels.

Autonomous retailing is a retail process where a physical store is aware of all elements involved—products, people, and activities—without explicit help from human workers. Autonomous stores allow shoppers to pick up products and walk out of the store, without going through a checkout lane. Although the concept is more than a decade old, Amazon Go, a recent effort to realize frictionless checkout, brings it a huge step closer to reality. Autonomous stores are an example of cyber-physical-human systems that incorporate advanced artificial intelligence (AI) through abound embedded sensors and computation. Natural human activities bring significant challenges to system provisioning, sensing, and inference, but also provide input for the system to learn from and adapt to. In this article, we discuss the design space and technical challenges of autonomous retailing and motive it as a frontier of cyber-physical-human system research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “In China, Amazon’s ‘store of the future’ is already open,” (https://www.techinasia.com/china-version-amazon-go-bingobox-funding).

  2. 2.

    “Alibaba’s self-service Tao Cafe takes e-shopping offline,” (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-07/11/c_136434967.htm).

  3. 3.

    https://www.standardcognition.com/.

  4. 4.

    GS1 is the standard body for managing retail bar codes. https://www.gs1.org/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft AI and Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA

    Jie Liu

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  1. Jie Liu
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Correspondence to Jie Liu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Marten Lohstroh

  2. National Instruments, Berkeley, California, USA

    Patricia Derler

  3. Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden, Reykjavík University, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Marjan Sirjani

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Liu, J. (2018). Autonomous Retailing: A Frontier for Cyber-Physical-Human Systems. In: Lohstroh, M., Derler, P., Sirjani, M. (eds) Principles of Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10760. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95246-8_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95246-8_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95245-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95246-8

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