Agentic4PDM: Host-Governed Evidence Admissibility for Industrial Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

We study industrial fault diagnosis as a classification task that assigns sensor time-series windows to predefined health states or fault types. Scarce labels and changing operating conditions make repeated training of specialized classifiers costly. Yet structures such as periodicity, trends, and transients can remain diagnostically informative and be examined through reusable analytical tools. LLM agents can select and interpret these tools, but fixed rules or training-derived guidance may not resolve each signal's ambiguity, while unconstrained interpretation may overstate weak or conflicting results. We introduce Agentic4PDM, a framework that separates adaptive investigation from control over evidence use. LLM agents compare each signal with labeled references from every candidate class, identify unresolved distinctions, and propose follow-up measurements. A deterministic software controller, called the host, enforces contract-checked gated adjudication (CCGA): it checks requests, requires commitment to a complete tool batch before results are observed, and assigns evidence roles based on tool checks against labeled references. These roles distinguish corroborative support from advisory information. The Judge Agent proposes a diagnosis, while the controller checks protocol compliance and records the investigation. Agentic4PDM supports training-free diagnosis using pretrained representations and labeled references without task-specific diagnostic models, and a standard setting that additionally investigates trained-model predictions. Experiments on selected bearing and motor diagnosis challenges and an unfiltered industrial test set supplied by our customer show gains in aggregate macro F1 over the evaluated diagnostic and agentic baselines. Ablations further support the value of the governed workflow.