Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

The paper presents the chatbot applicability for the health and safety of workers in the container transportation context. Starting from a literature review of risks and hazardous activities in sea container terminals, the paper underlines the need of innovative systems to ensure the lowest level of risks for labours. An analysis of the 4.0 technologies solutions in sea container terminals shows the lack of empirical application of chatbots in such a context. Focus is given to the current chatbot applications, and on the conceptual methodology for the chatbot design, defining five models and presenting a taxonomy for the chatbot feature definition. A case study shows the possible application of the conceptual methodology and the taxonomy, introducing the Popeye chatbot, consisting of a voice service, spoken language understanding component and an image processing app, to cope with the hazards in the process of examining freight and containers in dock areas. The main application of Popeye is the training of new employees involved in container safety-critical quality inspection and controls operations. © 2022 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V.