ProBot – A Procedure Chatbot for Digital Procedural Adherence

One of the major implications of Industry 4.0 will be the application of digital procedures in process industries. Digital procedures are procedures that are accessed through a smart gadget such as a tablet or a phone. However, like paper-based procedures their usability is limited by their access. The issue of accessibility is magnified in tasks such as loading a hopper car with plastic pellets wherein the operators typically place the procedure at a safe distance from the worksite. This drawback can be tackled in the case of digital procedures using artificial intelligence-based voice enabled conversational agent (chatbot). As a part of this study, we have developed a chatbot for assisting digital procedure adherence. The chatbot is trained using the possible set of queries from the operator and text from the digital procedures through deep learning and provides responses using natural language generation. The testing of the chatbot is performed using a simulated conversation with an operator performing the task of loading a hopper car.