The Potential and Impact of Conversational Agents for Industry 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review

Supervisor: Christian Fleiner

Prerequisites: the student must have excellent English skills and should have an analytical mind.

Start Date: between April’22 and June’22

Description: the term “Industry 4.0 (I4.0)” had his 10-year anniversary in 2021. During this period, advances in machine learning, low-cost microcontrollers and new communication standards brought the vision of I4.0 closer to reality. Now, it is time to review the potential and impact of important technologies.
In this master thesis, a systematic literature review [1,2,3,4] shall be conducted to give insights about the application of conversational agents in production environments. Conversational agents (or virtual assistants) are software agents that are communicating with natural language. Popular conversational agents are Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. In contrast to the service sector, where conversational agents (e.g., chatbots) are mainly used as 1st line support, production sectors are still trying out for what purpose they can use conversational agents.
The objective of this master thesis is to answer the question why conversational agents are applied in production environments. This includes the identification of use cases, domains, and respective problems that applied conversational agents solve. It is also important to disclose the capabilities and limitations of conversational agents and what alternative solutions exist.

[1] Barbara Kitchenham and Stuart Charters. 2007. Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering.
[2] Moher D, Liberati A, Tetzlaff J, Altman DG, The PRISMA Group (2009). Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: The PRISMA Statement. PLoS Med 6, 7: e1000097.
[3] Nightingale, A. (2009). A guide to systematic literature reviews. Surgery (Oxford), 27(9), 381-384.
[4] Pickering, C., & Byrne, J. (2014). The benefits of publishing systematic quantitative literature reviews for PhD candidates and other early-career researchers. Higher Education Research & Development, 33(3), 534-548.

Please contact Christian Fleiner (christian.fleiner@fau.de) for more information if you are interested in this topic.