By analyzing future opportunities and threats, the forecaster can improve decisions in order to achieve maximum benefits.
[1] Today, most countries are experiencing huge social and economic changes, which heavily rely on technology development.
In 1945, the U.S. Army Air Forces created a report called Toward New Horizons, which surveyed the technology development and discussed the importance for future studies.
[3] In the 1950s and 1960s, RAND Corporation developed the Delphi Technique and were widely accepted and used to make smart evaluation for the future.
[4] The applications of Delphi Technique are a turning point in the history of technology forecasting, because it became an efficient tool for knowledge building and decision-making, especially for social policy and public health issues.
[5] In the 1970s, private sector and government agencies out of military area widely adopted technology forecasting and helped to diversify the users and applications.
Improved software can help analysts search and retrieve data information from large complicated database and then graphically represents interrelations.
— Jim Moore, director of the Transportation Engineering Program at the University of Southern California[8] Primarily, a technological forecast deals with the characteristics of technology, such as levels of technical performance, like speed of a military aircraft, the power in watts of a particular future engine, the accuracy or precision of a measuring instrument, the number of transistors in a chip in the year 2015, etc.
This is to exclude from the domain of technological forecasting those commodities, services or techniques intended for luxury or amusement.
For example, a computer-based approach “Pattern” is an expensive forecasting method which is not recommended to be used in cases of restricted funds.
[11][12][13] Normative methods of technology forecasting—like the relevance trees, morphological models, and mission flow diagrams—are also commonly used.
IoT system helps managers to monitor and control the production process by collecting, tracking and transferring data.