Decision support service framework for Japanese floricultural wholesale markets

The floricultural industry in Japan is facing a serious problem of decreasing consumption, and seeking for an effective way to create a seasonal trend of flowers which could capture the heart of consumers. On the other hand, all major Japanese floricultural wholesale (B2B) markets have adopted powerful information systems such as modem auction and dispatching systems, therefore, providing high quality knowledge based service for both flower suppliers and retailers has become the source of competitiveness. Seeking the needs of consumer to make a new trend and support suppliers and retailers to make their decision is a new challenge for floricuhural wholesale markets. The aim of this research is to propose a decision support service framework in floricultural wholesale markets which is based on knowledge discovery. The decision support service helps retailers to have their own seasonal purchasing model according to the role model (model made by trend creators), so that retailers could make their purchasing plan more adaptive to the seasonal consumer needs. In this paper, the problems in Japanese floriculture wholesale markets is discussed from the point of view of knowledge discovery and decision support, and a conceptual model of a decision support service is introduced.