Wind Turbine Maintenance Log Labelling Framework: LLM-Driven Data Correction and Enrichment via Semantic Extraction of Reliability Intelligence
Authors: Max Malyi, Jonathan Shek, Alasdair McDonald, Andre Biscaya
Organizations: Institute for Energy Systems, School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK · 2Nadara, Lisbon, Portugal
Abstract
As wind turbine fleets age, data-driven reliability engineering is essential to optimise their operation and maintenance for service life extension and levelised cost of energy reduction. Failure event descriptions within historical maintenance logs are a source of valuable reliability intelligence. However, they typically appear as unstructured natural language entries, rendering them inaccessible for quantitative analysis. This paper presents a novel methodology leveraging a large language model (LLM) to systematically standardise and structure maintenance logs based on their free-text descriptors. Operating on a dataset of 16,316 maintenance logs from 280 turbines monitored over nine years, the developed model-agnostic framework autonomously corrected hierarchical system codes and extracted evidence-based taxonomies of maintenance actions and failure modes. The automated pipeline successfully structured over 70% of the dataset. It resolved pervasive misclassification issues, such as isolating previously unclassified pitch system faults and restoring missing system codes, and enriched the records by applying empirical taxonomies to label specific actions taken and failure modes addressed. By using system-based log batches to construct empirical dictionaries of failure modes, observable symptoms, dominant mechanisms, and candidate causes, this approach reduces the inherent subjectivity of manual failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). Ultimately, the methodology provides a highly scalable, cost-effective blueprint for translating large sets of qualitative field observations into quantitative reliability metrics, laying the foundation for integrated root-cause analysis across the renewable energy sector, improved FMEA, and advanced predictive 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.
In the maintenance of complex systems, fault trees are used to locate problems and provide targeted solutions. To enable fault trees stored as images to be directly processed by large language models, which can assist in tracking and analyzing malfunctions, we propose a novel textual representation of fault trees. Building on it, we construct a benchmark for multi-turn dialogue systems that emphasizes robust interaction in complex environments, evaluating a model's ability to assist in malfunction localization, which contains 3130 entries and 40.75 turns per entry on average. We train an end-to-end model to generate vague information to reflect user behavior and introduce long-range rollback and recovery procedures to simulate user error scenarios, enabling assessment of a model's integrated capabilities in task tracking and error recovery, and Gemini 2.5 pro archives the best performance.
With the increasing scale and number of wind farms, wind turbines' daily operation and maintenance costs are increasing. To reduce operation and maintenance costs and enhance the reliability of wind turbine and system operation data before reaching catastrophic failures, monitoring the operating status of the equipment and detecting failures at an early stage is crucial. It is of great practical significance to utilize the working condition data for abnormal assessment of the operating status of wind turbines to realize abnormal monitoring of the operating status of wind turbines. However, the existing anomaly detection methods can neither perform effective relational modeling in data filled with a large amount of redundant information nor reasonably utilize the valuable anomaly data. For this reason, this paper proposes an anomaly detection model that fuses a Transformer and a generative adversarial network. Firstly, it reduces the leakage detection rate of minor deviation anomalies by amplifying the reconstruction error. Secondly, it uses autoregressive inference to extract multimodal features to enhance the stability and generalization ability of training. Finally, the temporal feature extraction module is constructed to promote the interactive learning between features of different time scales and effectively reduce the time redundancy. The results of multiple sets of experiments conducted on real WTG datasets show that TransGAN-WT achieves an average F1 score of 96.10% across multiple wind turbine datasets, which is 5.84% and 2.89% higher than several other state-of-the-art baseline methods. It also realizes a false positive rate (FPR) of 0.06%, and is verified by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to have achieved a statistically significant performance enhancement compared to the state-of-the-art baseline methods, effectively ensuring the stable operation of wind turbines.