Structural Alignment for Reliable Industrial AI: Bridging Physical Reality, Data, Models, and Human Intent

AI reliability concerns whether an AI system performs its intended function dependably over a stated period and under stated operating conditions, with stated evidence. As these systems become more autonomous, that function includes more than a correct output. Retrieval, memory, tool use, permissions, human oversight, and interactions among systems must operate consistently and safely, and, for generative systems, so must the reasoning process that produces the output. Average benchmark accuracy measures capability; it does not quantify this broader reliability claim. This paper adapts established reliability engineering methods, from failure definitions and operational envelopes to FMEA, accelerated testing, field monitoring, and reliability growth, to AI systems. A four-level diagnostic framework classifies failures as component, operational-loop, agentic-conduct, or network and governance failures. Test, evaluation, verification, and validation (TEVV), sequential monitoring, and FRACAS create and refresh evidence. SMART provides statistical guidance for measurement, analysis, assessment, and test planning; the NIST AI Risk Management Framework provides organizational guidance for governance, evaluation, monitoring, and mitigation. Three cases illustrate the program: adversarial testing of a convolutional neural network, perception-error propagation, and autonomous-vehicle disengagements. Established reliability engineering provides a usable foundation; new measurements and safety guardrails are still needed as these systems are self-evolving.

The deployment of AI systems in safety-critical domains, such as industrial defect inspection, autonomous driving, and medical diagnosis, is severely hampered by their lack of reliability. A single undetected erroneous prediction can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Unfortunately, there is often no alternative but to place trust in the outputs of a trained AI system, which operates without an internal safeguard to flag unreliable predictions, even in cases of high accuracy. We propose a post-hoc explanation-based indicator to detect false negatives in binary defect detection networks. To our knowledge, this is the first method to proactively identify potentially erroneous network outputs. Our core idea leverages the difference between class-specific discriminative heatmaps and class-agnostic ones. We compute the difference in their intersection over union (IoU) as a reliability score. An adversarial enhancement method is further introduced to amplify this disparity. Evaluations on two industrial defect detection benchmarks show our method effectively identifies false negatives. With adversarial enhancement, it achieves 100% recall, albeit with a trade-off for true negatives. Our work thus advocates for a new and trustworthy deployment paradigm: data-model-explanation-output, moving beyond conventional end-to-end systems to provide critical support for reliable AI in real-world applications.

Foundation models, particularly large language models, are increasingly integrated into agent architectures for industrial tasks such as decision support, process monitoring, and engineering automation. Yet evidence on their purposes, capabilities, and limitations remains fragmented across domains. This work examines how mature foundation-model-based agent systems are in industrial contexts, how their functional profile differs from conventional agent systems, and which limitations persist. A systematic literature survey following the PRISMA 2020 guideline is presented, screening 2,341 publications and synthesising a corpus of 88 publications through a structured coding scheme. The results show that reported systems are predominantly at prototype and early validation stages (75.0% at TRL 4-6), with deployment-oriented evidence remaining rare (9.1%). Operational goals are most frequently positioned in user assistance, monitoring, and process optimisation, while conventional production-control purposes such as planning and scheduling are less prominent. Compared with an established baseline for industrial agent systems, the capability profile reveals substantial gains in human interaction (+37%) and dealing with uncertainty (+35%), but a pronounced deficit in negotiation (-39%). The most widely reported limitations concern lack of generalization, hallucination and output instability, data scarcity, and inference latency. A working definition of foundation-model-based industrial agents is also proposed, bridging conventional agent theory, automation-engineering standards, and the foundation-model paradigm.