Download PDFOpen PDF in browserRitchy – Federated AI Support: Quality Assurance, Architecture, Operations11 pages•Published: June 18, 2026AbstractWe present Ritchy, an AI-powered support chatbot that has been in productive use at the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University since spring 2025. Ritchy combines a large language model (LLM) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounded in curated documentation synchronized from the knowledge management system Sabio. Based on operational data and an ISO 9001-embedded PDCA process, we show that user feedback alone is too incomplete and sometimes biased to serve as a reliable quality indicator, making continuous human quality assurance essential. From these findings, we derive key requirements for federated deployment—multi-tenancy, local content ownership, and quality assurance as a core function—and propose a reference architecture separating a shared platform layer from the university-specific layer. We further outline three deployment scenarios (all-in-one, fully configurable, and open source) and corresponding cost models.Keyphrases: ai chatbot, architecture, federated ai support, operation, quality assurance, rag, ritchy, servicedesk In: Laurence Desnos, Carmen Diaz, Janina Mincer-Daszkiewicz, Lazaros Merakos, Raimund Vogl, Stuart McLellan and Ulrike Lucke (editors). Proceedings of EUNIS 2026 Annual Congress, vol 109, pages 41-51.
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