Evidence-Driven Reasoning for Industrial Maintenance Using Heterogeneous Data

Fearghal O’Donncha, Nianjun Zhou, Natalia Martinez, James T Rayfield, Fenno F. Heath III, Abigail Langbridge, Roman Vaculin


Abstract
Industrial maintenance platforms contain rich but fragmented evidence, including free-text work orders, heterogeneous operational sensors or indicators, and structured failure knowledge. These sources are often analyzed in isolation, producing alerts or forecasts that do not support conditional decision-making: given this asset history and behavior, what is happening and what action is warranted?We present Condition Insight Agent, a deployed decision-support framework that integrates maintenance language, behavioral abstractions of operational data, and engineering failure semantics to produce evidence-grounded explanations and advisory actions. The system constrains reasoning through deterministic evidence construction and structured failure knowledge, and applies a rule-based verification loop to suppress unsupported conclusions.Case studies from production CMMS deployments show that this verification-first design operates reliably under heterogeneous and incomplete data while preserving human oversight. Our results demonstrate how constrained LLM-based reasoning can function as a governed decision-support layer for industrial maintenance.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-industry.50
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Yunyao Li, Georg Rehm, Mei Tu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
736–748
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-industry.50/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fearghal O’Donncha, Nianjun Zhou, Natalia Martinez, James T Rayfield, Fenno F. Heath III, Abigail Langbridge, and Roman Vaculin. 2026. Evidence-Driven Reasoning for Industrial Maintenance Using Heterogeneous Data. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track), pages 736–748, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evidence-Driven Reasoning for Industrial Maintenance Using Heterogeneous Data (O’Donncha et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-industry.50.pdf