Data quality affecting big data analytics in smart factories: Research themes, issues and methods

Recent years have seen a growing call for use of big data analytics techniques to support the realisation of symmetries and simulations in digital twins and smart factories, in which data quality plays an important role in determining the quality of big data analytics products. Although data quality affecting big data analytics has received attention in the smart factory research field, to date a systematic review of the topic of interest for understanding the present state of the art is not available, which could help reveal the trends and gaps in this area. This paper therefore presents a systematic literature review of research articles about data quality affecting big data analytics in smart factories that have been published up to 2020. We examined 31 empirical studies from our selection of papers to identify the research themes in this field. The analysis of these studies links data quality issues toward big data analytics with data quality dimensions and methods used to address these issues in the smart factory context. The findings of this systematic review also provide implications for practitioners in addressing data quality issues to better use big data analytics products to support digital symmetry in the context of smart factory.