[MA] The Potential and Impact of Instructive Assistance Systems 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 instructive assistance systems in production environments. Instructive assistance systems are applications that provide guidance and aid to help users completing a task. For instance, many instructive assistance systems harness augmented reality where explanatory text is displayed in the users’ view to support assembly work.
The objective of this master thesis is to answer the question why instructive assistance systems are applied in production environments. This includes the identification of use cases, domains, and respective problems that instructive assistance systems solve. It is also important to disclose the capabilities and limitations of instructive assistance systems 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.