Machine Learning for industrial applications: A comprehensive literature review

Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence that studies algorithms able to learn autonomously, directly from the input data. Over the last decade, ML techniques have made a huge leap forward, as demonstrated by Deep Learning (DL) algorithms implemented by autonomous driving cars, or by electronic strategy games. Hence, researchers have started to consider ML also for applications within the industrial field, and many works indicate ML as one the main enablers to evolve a traditional manufacturing system up to the Industry 4.0 level. Nonetheless, industrial applications are still few and limited to a small cluster of international companies. This paper deals with these topics, intending to clarify the real potentialities, as well as potential flaws, of ML algorithms applied to operation management. A comprehensive review is presented and organized in a way that should facilitate the orientation of practitioners in this field. To this aim, papers from 2000 to date are categorized in terms of the applied algorithm and application domain, and a keyword analysis is also performed, to details the most promising topics in the field. What emerges is a consistent upward trend in the number of publications, with a spike of interest for unsupervised and especially deep learning techniques, which recorded a very high number of publications in the last five years. Concerning trends, along with consolidated research areas, recent topics that are growing in popularity were also discovered. Among these, the main ones are production planning and control and defect analysis, thus suggesting that in the years to come ML will become pervasive in many fields of operation management.