Give bounded context.
Provide the mission objective, approved evidence, constraints, and required output rather than asking for a generic solution.
Deploy a field-service knowledge assistant that remains useful under operational pressure without producing unsupported or unsafe repair guidance.
The lab permits agent-assisted investigation and implementation. Strong work records material agent recommendations, checks them against authorized evidence, and documents what the learner accepted, changed, rejected, or left unresolved.
Provide the mission objective, approved evidence, constraints, and required output rather than asking for a generic solution.
Require multiple hypotheses, failure modes, and disconfirming evidence before choosing an intervention.
Check source IDs, calculations, code behavior, policy constraints, and unsupported causal language.
Record why the final decision follows from the evidence and what would cause it to change.
The Core Labs isolate individual failure modes. This mission forces several of them to coexist under one customer timeline, one evidence room, and one final deployment recommendation.
How much authority should a field-service knowledge assistant receive when approved manuals, bulletins, work orders, and technician practice disagree?
Semantic relevance competes with document revision, asset applicability, regional rules, source hierarchy, and informal knowledge that may be useful but unauthorized.
Define the assistant's source hierarchy, answer states, escalation boundary, memory behavior, and release scope before expanding to additional equipment families.
The simulated industrial service organization maintains complex industrial equipment at customer sites. Experienced technicians solve many issues from memory, while newer technicians search across manuals, service bulletins, parts catalogs, and old work orders.
The mission asks the learner to deploy an AI-assisted retrieval workflow that clearly exposes evidence, respects document authority, handles conflicting sources, and escalates when the system cannot answer safely.
The corpus is designed so the most readable source is not always the safest and the most authoritative source is not always the most current.
Highest authority for hazardous work. Answers may not contradict these controls.
BindingMay supersede older manuals for specific equipment models and serial ranges.
Authoritative and time-sensitiveComprehensive but potentially outdated when newer bulletins exist.
Approved with version checksOperationally useful observations with inconsistent quality and incomplete verification.
Contextual evidenceConcise, practical, and sometimes unsafe. Cannot silently override approved procedure.
Unverified field knowledgeThe system is evaluated as an operational product, not merely on whether an LLM can produce fluent answers.
Parse, classify, version, deduplicate, and attach equipment applicability metadata.
Resolve model numbers, serial ranges, aliases, and component relationships before retrieval.
Rank by authority, recency, equipment match, safety relevance, and semantic relevance.
Expose source passages, version dates, authority level, uncertainty, and conflicts.
Block unsupported procedural synthesis and route hazardous or ambiguous cases to human review.
Collect corrections without allowing unreviewed feedback to alter approved procedure.
A strong evaluation set includes answerable, ambiguous, outdated, conflicting, and safety-critical cases.
| Metric | What it tests | Target behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Citation accuracy | Whether claims are supported by the displayed source passages. | Unsupported claims are treated as failures. |
| Retrieval relevance | Whether the returned sources match equipment, issue, and procedure context. | Authority and applicability outweigh generic semantic similarity. |
| Unsupported-answer rate | How often the system invents or overextends beyond evidence. | Near zero for procedural claims. |
| Safety escalation accuracy | Whether hazardous or conflicting cases reach human review. | High recall with documented false-positive tradeoffs. |
| Outdated-source usage | Whether superseded documents influence answers improperly. | Newer bulletins visibly override older manuals. |
| Abstention quality | Whether the system refuses clearly and usefully when evidence is insufficient. | Refusal includes missing information and next action. |
| User correction rate | How often technicians identify a wrong mapping, source, or answer. | Corrections enter a governed review queue. |
| Latency and cost | Whether the workflow remains usable in field conditions. | Targets reflect limited connectivity and device constraints. |
The complication is released after the first retrieval and answer-policy checkpoint.
Pilot technicians consistently prefer answers grounded in informal work-order notes because they are shorter and more practical. Several of those notes describe unofficial shortcuts that bypass safety checks or use obsolete parts.
Required response: revise source ranking, answer composition, warnings, feedback handling, and escalation. Preserve the useful field context without allowing unapproved notes to become procedural authority.
Safer but may reduce usefulness and technician adoption.
Use notes as supporting context while preventing them from generating instructions.
Promote useful field practices only after expert validation and document governance.
Show disagreements among sources rather than silently selecting one answer.
The workspace includes an evidence hierarchy, eight staged decisions, a safety complication, notebook, artifact studio, progress tracking, and portfolio export.
Decision boundary, source hierarchy, required workflow, complication, and evaluation dimensions.
Manuals, bulletins, work orders, technician notes, versions, and model mappings.
Eight stages, persistent notebook, evidence review, complication, and progress tracking.
Authority model, evaluation record, release controls, executive recommendation, and portfolio export.
Build a useful retrieval workflow while preventing unsupported or unsafe repair guidance from reaching technicians.