Agent-based Condition Monitoring Assistance with Multimodal Industrial Database Retrieval Augmented Generation

Condition monitoring (CM) plays a crucial role in ensuring reliability and efficiency in the process industry. Although computerised maintenance systems effectively detect and classify faults, tasks like fault severity estimation, and maintenance decisions still largely depend on human expert analysis. The analysis and decision making automatically performed by current systems typically exhibit considerable uncertainty and high false alarm rates, leading to increased workload and reduced efficiency. This work integrates large language model (LLM)-based reasoning agents with CM workflows to address analyst and industry needs, namely reducing false alarms, enhancing fault severity estimation, improving decision support, and offering explainable interfaces. We propose MindRAG, a modular framework combining multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with novel vector store structures designed specifically for CM data. The framework leverages existing annotations and maintenance work orders as surrogates for labels in a supervised learning protocol, addressing the common challenge of training predictive models on unlabelled and noisy real-world datasets. The primary contributions include: (1) an approach for structuring industry CM data into a semi-structured multimodal vector store compatible with LLM-driven workflows; (2) developing multimodal RAG techniques tailored for CM data; (3) developing practical reasoning agents capable of addressing real-world CM queries; and (4) presenting an experimental framework for integrating and evaluating such agents in realistic industrial scenarios. Preliminary results, evaluated with the help of an experienced analyst, indicate that MindRAG provide meaningful decision support for more efficient management of alarms, thereby improving the interpretability of CM systems.

Dictionary learning approach to monitoring of wind turbine drivetrain bearings

Condition monitoring is central to the efficient operation of wind farms due to the challenging operating conditions, rapid technology development and high number of aging wind turbines. In particular, predictive maintenance planning requires early detection of faults with few false positives. This is a challenging problem due to the complex and weak signatures of some faults, in particular of faults occurring in some of the drivetrain bearings. Here, we investigate recently proposed condition monitoring methods based on unsupervised dictionary learning using vibration data recorded over 46 months under typical industrial operations, thereby contributing novel test results and real world data that is made publicly available. Results of former studies addressing condition--monitoring tasks using dictionary learning indicate that unsupervised feature learning is useful for diagnosis and anomaly detection purposes. However, these studies are based on small sets of labeled data from test rigs operating under controlled conditions that focus on classification tasks, which are useful for quantitative method comparisons but gives little information about how useful these approaches are in practice. In this study dictionaries are learned from gearbox vibrations in six different turbines and the dictionaries are subsequently propagated over a few years of monitoring data when faults are known to occur. We perform the experiment using two different sparse coding algorithms to investigate if the algorithm selected affects the features of abnormal conditions. We calculate the dictionary distance between the initial and propagated dictionaries and find time periods of abnormal dictionary adaptation starting six months before a drivetrain bearing replacement and one year before the resulting gearbox replacement. We also investigate the distance between dictionaries learned from geographically nearby