Chatting about processes in digital factories: A model-based approach

Using chatbots in digital factories, to interact with devices through instant messages and voice commands, can make the understanding of underlying manufacturing, logistic and business processes easier for workers. Intelligent chatbots can provide flexible conversations and tailor them to the specific users who are interacting. The iCHAT framework conceptually represents all the aspects related to a conversation, with different facets for the user, the conversation flow, and the conversation contents, and combining them to obtain a flexible interaction with the user. In digital factories, flexible production is driven by processes combining different services. In this paper, we present an original approach extending iCHAT to be able to chat about processes, aiming at instructing a worker about a process.