HERA’s Van Thu Huynh built a chatbot that answers welding standard questions and shows its working.
Checking material test certificates can mean digging through hundreds of pages. It takes time, and tired eyes can miss things.
Dr Van Thu Huynh investigated whether AI could make this process faster and more reliable as part of HERA’s project with the University of Sydney and ACM CRC.
Van presented the work at the 8th International Conference on Geotechnics, Civil Engineering and Structures (CIGOS 2026) in Ho Chi Minh City, where he received the Best Oral Presentation Award.
Ask a question, get an answer you can check
The solution uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The system searches the certificates, retrieves the relevant requirements from the compliance documents, and generates an answer grounded in those sources.
Importantly, each answer can be traced back to its source.
Does it get it right?
The team tested the system using benchmark questions with verified answers taken directly from the relevant clauses. Two language models were tested using the same setup.
GPT-4o performed strongly across the evaluation measures, while Llama-3.1’s performance declined as the questions became more complex.
When an answer needs to align with a standard, the choice of model matters.
What Van says
“It was a privilege to share with an international audience how artificial intelligence can be applied to address practical challenges in engineering,” says Van. “Receiving the Best Oral Presentation Award made the experience even more meaningful.“
Where it comes from
The work is part of a project funded by the Australian Composites Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (ACM CRC) and HERA, in partnership with the University of Sydney.
Van led the paper, working with his supervisor, Associate Professor Cao Hung Pham, Professor Anna Paradowska, and Michail Karpenko from HERA.
Springer is publishing the paper as a chapter in its Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering series.
What’s next?
The next step is to move beyond answering questions towards automated compliance checking. The material test certificate compliance checker will be further trialled and developed, with the capability incorporated into HERA’s AI-based Fabrication Compliance Management System (FCMS), currently under development.
The work will also expand the benchmark set and introduce reasoning that better understands the welding and fabrication domain.
The aim is practical: an AI-based compliance management system that inspectors, engineers and fabricators can use to support compliance checking in their daily work.
Want to see it in action? Updates and demonstrations of the material test certificate checker and FCMS development will be provided at the SCNZ Fabricators’ AI Workshops on 29 September, 30 September and 1 October.
