Ontology-integrated tuning of large language model for intelligent maintenance

As new AI technologies such as Large Language Models (LLM) quickly evolve, the need for enhancing general-purpose LLMs with physical knowledge to better serve the manufacturing community has been increasingly recognized. This paper presents a method that tailors GPT-3.5 with domain-specific knowledge for intelligent aircraft maintenance. Specifically, aircraft ontology is investigated to curate maintenance logs with encoded component hierarchical structure to fine-tune GPT-3.5. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed method in accurately identifying defective components and providing consistent maintenance action recommendations, outperforming general-purpose GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.0. The method can be adapted to other domains in manufacturing and beyond.