# Intelligent Procurement Scheduling System for Items Involving Public Procurement
## 2 Materials and Methods
such as skillset, efficient coordination, item criticality, number of item variants, procurement frequency, associated risks, supplier identification, competition among suppliers, estimated procurement value, approval processes, customer endorsement, quality assessments, commercial agreements, tender durations and more, the machine learning algorithm ranked the top five most influential variables that impact procurement duration. These key input variables are (1) the criticality of the item's requirement for the project. Criticality is identified as an event that has occurred and is impacting the project. Critical issues require immediate attention and real-time action and may be the result of risks identified at the start of the project or may come from an invisible area not initially considered. The organization has attached a criticality factor on a scale of 1 to 30, where \"30\" indicates the item is most critical for the project. (2) The number of variants available within a supply. For example, procurement of castables will normally be required in two variants: one is grade-A and the other is grade-C (3) Competition, as indicated by the number of suppliers submitting offers for a particular tender. (4) The frequency of item procurement within a fiscal year. (5) The tender estimate value in terms of 0.1 million rupees. The flow chart of the feature selection technique in machine learning used in this work is depicted in Figure 1. The algorithm is designed to gather the dataset containing the twenty-three input variables under consideration and perform necessary preprocessing, such as data cleaning and handling missing values. The RFE technique that iteratively removes the least important features based on the model's performance is used to select the top five most critical variables that will be further used by the fuzzy-based system. Table 2 provides data on these input variables for the items under investigation, along with the duration of the milestone activity (output variable). Membership functions have been established for these inputs, representing criticality, item variants, market competition, procurement frequency, tender value and the output, which signifies scheduled procurement norms for a particular item or item group. The fuzzy rule base governing this process is outlined in Table 3. Triangular membership functions have been employed in this proposed approach due to their versatility and reliability. To illustrate the construction of a triangular membership function for \"MEDIUM\" under the input variable of buying frequency, consider the following parameters: the base \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Item** & **Criticality** & **Variants** & **Competition** & **Buying Frequency** & **Value** & **Average Weeks** \\ \hline Rock fiber & 30 & 12 & 10 & 11 & \textgreater{}100 & 6 to 8 \\ Ceramic fiber & 4 & 1 & 6 & 4 & 54 & 14 to 16 \\ Castables & 15 & 2 & 6 & 4 & 82 & 14 to 16 \\ Pourables & 13 & 1 & 6 & 4 & 26 & 12 to 14 \\ Metal Mesh & 11 & 8 & 5 & 2 & 10 & 6 to 8 \\ Corrug. cladding & 18 & 3 & 5 & 2 & \textgreater{}100 & 18 to 20 \\ Plain cladding & 10 & 4 & 5 & 1 & \textgreater{}100 & 18 to 20 \\ EM valve & 9 & 2 & 2 & 2 & 12 & 10 to 12 \\ Transducers & 3 & 7 & 5 & 2 & 40 & 18 to 20 \\ Actuators & 2 & 4 & 6 & 2 & \textgreater{}100 & 14 to 16 \\ Control cables & 6 & 3 & 15 & 5 & 65 & 10 to 12 \\ Inst. Cable & 1 & 2 & 15 & 1 & 18 & 18 to 20 \\ Jun. Boxes & 9 & 1 & 5 & 4 & 4 & 10 to 12 \\ Switches & 9 & 1 & 2 & 2 & 8 & 10 to 12 \\ Elevator & 2 & 2 & 5 & 2 & \textgreater{}100 & 18 to 20 \\ Fittings & 4 & 50 & 6 & 2 & 10 & 8 to 10 \\ Control boxes & 2 & 1 & 5 & 1 & 2 & 10 to 12 \\ Teflon hoses & 3 & 4 & 6 & 2 & 1.5 & 14 to 16 \\ Pneu. tubes & 1 & 6 & 6 & 1 & 7 & 14 to 16 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Input and output variables in procurement. values of the MEDIUM triangle are 2.5 and 11, with a peak value of 6.5. This triangular function can be expressed as follows (Equation (1)):  
\[f(x)=\left\{