Evaluating Temporal Semantic Caching and Workflow Optimization in Agentic Plan-Execute Pipelines

Industrial asset operations workflows are latency-sensitive because a single user query may require coordination over sensor data, work orders, failure modes, forecasting tools, and domain-specific agents. We evaluate this problem on AssetOpsBench (AOB), an industrial agent benchmark whose plan-execute pipeline exposes repeated overhead from tool discovery, LLM planning, MCP tool execution, and final summarization. Existing LLM caching techniques such as KV-cache reuse and embedding-based semantic caching were designed for chatbot serving and break down when output validity depends on time, asset, or sensor parameters. We propose two complementary optimization layers for AOB plan-execute pipelines: a temporal semantic cache and a set of MCP workflow optimizations combining disk-backed tool-discovery caching and dependency-aware parallel step execution. MCP workflow optimizations corresponded to a 1.67x speedup and reduced median end-to-end latency by about 40.0% while the temporal-cache benchmark achieved a median of 30.6x speedup on cache hits. Beyond the speedup, our results expose a concrete failure mode of pure semantic caching for parameter-rich industrial queries, providing a critical analysis of how caching choices interact with evaluation correctness in MCP-backed agent benchmarks.

SPIN: Structural LLM Planning via Iterative Navigation for Industrial Tasks

Industrial LLM agent systems often separate planning from execution, yet LLM planners frequently produce structurally invalid or unnecessarily long workflows, leading to brittle failures and avoidable tool and API cost. We propose \texttt{SPIN}, a planning wrapper that combines validated Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning with prefix based execution control. \texttt{SPIN} enforces a strict DAG contract through \texttt{\_validate\_plan\_text} and repair prompting, producing executable plans before downstream execution, and then evaluates DAG prefixes incrementally to stop when the current prefix is sufficient to answer the query. On AssetOpsBench, across 261 scenarios, \texttt{SPIN} reduces executed tasks from 1061 to 623 and improves \emph{Accomplished} from 0.638 to 0.706, while reducing tool calls from 11.81 to 6.82 per run. On MCP Bench, the same wrapper improves planning, grounding, and dependency related scores for both GPT OSS1 and Llama 4 Maverick.

IndustryAssetEQA: A Neurosymbolic Operational Intelligence System for Embodied Question Answering in Industrial Asset Maintenance

Industrial maintenance environments increasingly rely on AI systems to assist operators in understanding asset behavior, diagnosing failures, and evaluating interventions. Although large language models (LLMs) enable fluent natural-language interaction, deployed maintenance assistants routinely produce generic explanations that are weakly grounded in telemetry, omit verifiable provenance, and offer no testable support for counterfactual or action-oriented reasoning that undermine trust in safety-critical settings. We present IndustryAssetEQA, a neurosymbolic operational intelligence system that combines episodic telemetry representations with a Failure Mode Effects Analysis Knowledge Graph (FMEA-KG) to enable Embodied Question Answering (EQA) over industrial assets. We evaluate on four datasets covering four industrial asset types, including rotating machinery, turbofan engines, hydraulic systems, and cyber-physical production systems. Compared to LLM-only baselines, IndustryAssetEQA improves structural validity by up to 0.51, counterfactual accuracy by up to 0.47, and explanation entailment by 0.64, while reducing severe expert-rated overclaims from 28% to 2% (approximately 93% reduction). Code, datasets, and the FMEA-KG are available at https://github.com/IBM/AssetOpsBench/tree/IndustryAssetEQA/IndustryAssetEQA.

PHMForge: A Scenario-Driven Agentic Benchmark for Industrial Asset Lifecycle Maintenance

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed for complex tool-orchestration tasks, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture the rigorous demands of industrial domains where incorrect decisions carry significant safety and financial consequences. To address this critical gap, we introduce PHMForge, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM agents on Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) tasks through realistic interactions with domain-specific MCP servers. Our benchmark encompasses 75 expert-curated scenarios spanning 7 industrial asset classes (turbofan engines, bearings, electric motors, gearboxes, aero-engines) across 5 core task categories: Remaining Useful Life (RUL) Prediction, Fault Classification, Engine Health Analysis, Cost-Benefit Analysis, and Safety/Policy Evaluation. To enable rigorous evaluation, we construct 65 specialized tools across two MCP servers and implement execution-based evaluators with task-commensurate metrics: MAE/RMSE for regression, F1-score for classification, and categorical matching for health assessments. Through extensive evaluation of leading frameworks (ReAct, Cursor Agent, Claude Code) paired with frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.0, GPT-4o, Granite-3.0-8B), we find that even top-performing configurations achieve only 68\% task completion, with systematic failures in tool orchestration (23\% incorrect sequencing), multi-asset reasoning (14.9 percentage point degradation), and cross-equipment generalization (42.7\% on held-out datasets). We open-source our complete benchmark, including scenario specifications, ground truth templates, tool implementations, and evaluation scripts, to catalyze research in agentic industrial AI.

From Static Templates to Dynamic Runtime Graphs: A Survey of Workflow Optimization for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based systems are becoming increasingly popular for solving tasks by constructing executable workflows that interleave LLM calls, information retrieval, tool use, code execution, memory updates, and verification. This survey reviews recent methods for designing and optimizing such workflows, which we treat as agentic computation graphs (ACGs). We organize the literature based on when workflow structure is determined, where structure refers to which components or agents are present, how they depend on each other, and how information flows between them. This lens distinguishes static methods, which fix a reusable workflow scaffold before deployment, from dynamic methods, which select, generate, or revise the workflow for a particular run before or during execution. We further organize prior work along three dimensions: when structure is determined, what part of the workflow is optimized, and which evaluation signals guide optimization (e.g., task metrics, verifier signals, preferences, or trace-derived feedback). We also distinguish reusable workflow templates, run-specific realized graphs, and execution traces, separating reusable design choices from the structures actually deployed in a given run and from realized runtime behavior. Finally, we outline a structure-aware evaluation perspective that complements downstream task metrics with graph-level properties, execution cost, robustness, and structural variation across inputs. Our goal is to provide a clear vocabulary, a unified framework for positioning new methods, a more comparable view of existing body of literature, and a more reproducible evaluation standard for future work in workflow optimizations for LLM agents.

SPIRAL: Symbolic LLM Planning via Grounded and Reflective Search

Large Language Models (LLMs) often falter at complex planning tasks that require exploration and self-correction, as their linear reasoning process struggles to recover from early mistakes. While search algorithms like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) can explore alternatives, they are often ineffective when guided by sparse rewards and fail to leverage the rich semantic capabilities of LLMs. We introduce SPIRAL (Symbolic LLM Planning via Grounded and Reflective Search), a novel framework that embeds a cognitive architecture of three specialized LLM agents into an MCTS loop. SPIRAL's key contribution is its integrated planning pipeline where a Planner proposes creative next steps, a Simulator grounds the search by predicting realistic outcomes, and a Critic provides dense reward signals through reflection. This synergy transforms MCTS from a brute-force search into a guided, self-correcting reasoning process. On the DailyLifeAPIs and HuggingFace datasets, SPIRAL consistently outperforms the default Chain-of-Thought planning method and other state-of-the-art agents. More importantly, it substantially surpasses other state-of-the-art agents; for example, SPIRAL achieves 83.6% overall accuracy on DailyLifeAPIs, an improvement of over 16 percentage points against the next-best search framework, while also demonstrating superior token efficiency. Our work demonstrates that structuring LLM reasoning as a guided, reflective, and grounded search process yields more robust and efficient autonomous planners. The source code, full appendices, and all experimental data are available for reproducibility at the official project repository.

Fine-Tuned Thoughts: Leveraging Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Industrial Asset Health Monitoring

Small Language Models (SLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in specialized fields, such as industrial applications, due to their efficiency, lower computational requirements, and ability to be fine-tuned for domain-specific tasks, enabling accurate and cost-effective solutions. However, performing complex reasoning using SLMs in specialized fields such as Industry 4.0 remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a knowledge distillation framework for industrial asset health, which transfers reasoning capabilities via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation from Large Language Models (LLMs) to smaller, more efficient models (SLMs). We discuss the advantages and the process of distilling LLMs using multi-choice question answering (MCQA) prompts to enhance reasoning and refine decision-making. We also perform in-context learning to verify the quality of the generated knowledge and benchmark the performance of fine-tuned SLMs with generated knowledge against widely used LLMs. The results show that the fine-tuned SLMs with CoT reasoning outperform the base models by a significant margin, narrowing the gap to their LLM counterparts. Our code is open-sourced at: https://github.com/IBM/FailureSensorIQ.

Towards Building General Purpose Embedding Models for Industry 4.0 Agents

In this work we focus on improving language models' understanding for asset maintenance to guide the engineer's decisions and minimize asset downtime. Given a set of tasks expressed in natural language for Industry 4.0 domain, each associated with queries related to a specific asset, we want to recommend relevant items and generalize to queries of similar assets. A task may involve identifying relevant sensors given a query about an asset's failure mode. Our approach begins with gathering a qualitative, expert-vetted knowledge base to construct nine asset-specific task datasets. To create more contextually informed embeddings, we augment the input tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs), providing concise descriptions of the entities involved in the queries. This embedding model is then integrated with a Reasoning and Acting agent (ReAct), which serves as a powerful tool for answering complex user queries that require multi-step reasoning, planning, and knowledge inference. Through ablation studies, we demonstrate that: (a) LLM query augmentation improves the quality of embeddings, (b) Contrastive loss and other methods that avoid in-batch negatives are superior for datasets with queries related to many items, and (c) It is crucial to balance positive and negative in-batch samples. After training and testing on our dataset, we observe a substantial improvement: HIT@1 increases by +54.2%, MAP@100 by +50.1%, and NDCG@10 by +54.7%, averaged across all tasks and models. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate the model's planning and tool invocation capabilities when answering complex questions related to industrial asset maintenance, showcasing its effectiveness in supporting Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in their day-to-day operations.

Chat-of-Thought: Collaborative Multi-Agent System for Generating Domain Specific Information

This paper presents a novel multi-agent system called Chat-of-Thought, designed to facilitate the generation of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) documents for industrial assets. Chat-of-Thought employs multiple collaborative Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents with specific roles, leveraging advanced AI techniques and dynamic task routing to optimize the generation and validation of FMEA tables. A key innovation in this system is the introduction of a Chat of Thought, where dynamic, multi-persona-driven discussions enable iterative refinement of content. This research explores the application domain of industrial equipment monitoring, highlights key challenges, and demonstrates the potential of Chat-of-Thought in addressing these challenges through interactive, template-driven workflows and context-aware agent collaboration.

AssetOpsBench: Benchmarking AI Agents for Task Automation in Industrial Asset Operations and Maintenance

AI for Industrial Asset Lifecycle Management aims to automate complex operational workflows -- such as condition monitoring, maintenance planning, and intervention scheduling -- to reduce human workload and minimize system downtime. Traditional AI/ML approaches have primarily tackled these problems in isolation, solving narrow tasks within the broader operational pipeline. In contrast, the emergence of AI agents and large language models (LLMs) introduces a next-generation opportunity: enabling end-to-end automation across the entire asset lifecycle. This paper envisions a future where AI agents autonomously manage tasks that previously required distinct expertise and manual coordination. To this end, we introduce AssetOpsBench -- a unified framework and environment designed to guide the development, orchestration, and evaluation of domain-specific agents tailored for Industry 4.0 applications. We outline the key requirements for such holistic systems and provide actionable insights into building agents that integrate perception, reasoning, and control for real-world industrial operations. The software is available at https://github.com/IBM/AssetOpsBench.