Intelligent Human-Machine Partnership for Manufacturing: Enhancing Warehouse Planning through Simulation-Driven Knowledge Graphs and LLM Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper presents a collaborative system integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models to improve manufacturing planning by enabling natural language interaction with simulation data, enhancing decision-making and operational insights.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel framework combining Knowledge Graphs and LLMs for seamless human-machine collaboration in manufacturing planning, with natural language interfaces and iterative reasoning.

Findings

Near-perfect accuracy in operational inquiries

Effective support for complex investigative analysis

Enhanced understanding of interconnected operational issues

Abstract

Manufacturing planners face complex operational challenges that require seamless collaboration between human expertise and intelligent systems to achieve optimal performance in modern production environments. Traditional approaches to analyzing simulation-based manufacturing data often create barriers between human decision-makers and critical operational insights, limiting effective partnership in manufacturing planning. Our framework establishes a collaborative intelligence system integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Model-based agents to bridge this gap, empowering manufacturing professionals through natural language interfaces for complex operational analysis. The system transforms simulation data into semantically rich representations, enabling planners to interact naturally with operational insights without specialized expertise. A collaborative LLM agent works alongside human decision-makers, employing iterative reasoning that mirrors human analytical thinking while generating precise queries for knowledge extraction and providing transparent validation. This partnership approach to manufacturing bottleneck identification, validated through operational scenarios, demonstrates enhanced performance while maintaining human oversight and decision authority. For operational inquiries, the system achieves near-perfect accuracy through natural language interaction. For investigative scenarios requiring collaborative analysis, we demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in supporting human experts to uncover interconnected operational issues that enhance understanding and decision-making. This work advances collaborative manufacturing by creating intuitive methods for actionable insights, reducing cognitive load while amplifying human analytical capabilities in evolving manufacturing ecosystems.