Smart factory technology, a core component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, demonstrates significant disparities in technological development across countries. To quantitatively assess these international technology gaps, this study proposes an integrated analytical framework that combines text mining-based topic modeling and social network analysis (SNA), using global smart factory-related patent data from 2017 to 2023. Approximately 4,300 patent documents (titles and abstracts) were collected through the GPASS system and preprocessed. Through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling with optimized hyperparameters, major technology topics were identified. Semantic interpretation using ChatGPT and expert review enabled the assignment of precise topic labels, which were further mapped to CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) codes to construct a standardized technology taxonomy. Subsequently, the network structures of topic and classification nodes were analyzed by country (China, the United States, and South Korea), and the relative importance of key technology areas was evaluated using centrality metrics such as degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality. The analysis revealed that, globally, the most central technology areas include manufacturing process management and control, IoT and data-driven decision making, and facility-based process optimization. At the national level, China showed a strategic focus on technologies related to product quality improvement and cost reduction, South Korea emphasized IoT-enabled technologies and equipment-level optimization, while the United States prioritized control systems and data-driven project management. By utilizing patent-based textual data, this study offers a novel methodology for quantitatively diagnosing structural differences in national technological capabilities. The proposed framework provides valuable insights for country-specific R&D planning and strategic decision-making in the field of smart manufacturing.

Fueled by international efforts towards AI standardization, including those by the European Commission, the United States, and international organizations, this study introduces a AI-driven framework for analyzing advancements in drone technology. Utilizing project data retrieved from the NTIS DB via the “drone” keyword, the framework employs a diverse toolkit of supervised learning methods (Keras MLP, XGboost, LightGBM, and CatBoost) enhanced by BERTopic (natural language analysis tool). This multifaceted approach ensures both comprehensive data quality evaluation and in-depth structural analysis of documents. Furthermore, a 6T-based classification method refines non-applicable data for year-on-year AI analysis, demonstrably improving accuracy as measured by accuracy metric. Utilizing AI’s power, including GPT-4, this research unveils year-on-year trends in emerging keywords and employs them to generate detailed summaries, enabling efficient processing of large text datasets and offering an AI analysis system applicable to policy domains. Notably, this study not only advances methodologies aligned with AI Act standards but also lays the groundwork for responsible AI implementation through analysis of government research and development investments.

In this study, we propose a novel approach to analyze big data related to patents in the field of smart factories, utilizing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling method and the generative artificial intelligence technology, ChatGPT. Our method includes extracting valuable insights from a large data-set of associated patents using LDA to identify latent topics and their corresponding patent documents. Additionally, we validate the suitability of the topics generated using generative AI technology and review the results with domain experts. We also employ the powerful big data analysis tool, KNIME, to preprocess and visualize the patent data, facilitating a better understanding of the global patent landscape and enabling a comparative analysis with the domestic patent environment. In order to explore quantitative and qualitative comparative advantages at this juncture, we have selected six indicators for conducting a quantitative analysis. Consequently, our approach allows us to explore the distinctive characteristics and investment directions of individual countries in the context of research and development and commercialization, based on a global-scale patent analysis in the field of smart factories. We anticipate that our findings, based on the analysis of global patent data in the field of smart factories, will serve as vital guidance for determining individual countries' directions in research and development investment. Furthermore, we propose a novel utilization of GhatGPT as a tool for validating the suitability of selected topics for policy makers who must choose topics across various scientific and technological domains.