AISAC: An Integrated multi-agent System for Transparent, Retrieval-Grounded Scientific Assistance
This system addresses the need for transparent and customizable AI assistance in scientific and engineering workflows, though it is incremental as it builds on established technologies.
The authors developed AISAC, an integrated multi-agent system for scientific workflows, which tackles the problem of providing transparent and adaptable AI assistance by implementing a Router-Planner-Coordinator workflow with provenance tracking, and demonstrated its applicability across domains like waste-to-products research and energy process safety.
AI Scientific Assistant Core (AISAC) is an integrated multi-agent system developed at Argonne National Laboratory for scientific and engineering workflows. AISAC builds on established technologies - LangGraph for orchestration, FAISS for vector search, and SQLite for persistence - and integrates them into a unified system prototype focused on transparency, provenance tracking, and scientific adaptability. The system implements a Router-Planner-Coordinator workflow and an optional Evaluator role, using prompt-engineered agents coordinated via LangGraph's StateGraph and supported by helper agents such as a Researcher. Each role is defined through custom system prompts that enforce structured JSON outputs. A hybrid memory approach (FAISS + SQLite) enables both semantic retrieval and structured conversation history. An incremental indexing strategy based on file hashing minimizes redundant re-embedding when scientific corpora evolve. A configuration-driven project bootstrap layer allows research teams to customize tools, prompts, and data sources without modifying core code. All agent decisions, tool invocations, and retrievals are logged and visualized through a custom Gradio interface, providing step-by-step transparency for each reasoning episode. The authors have applied AISAC to multiple research areas at Argonne, including specialized deployments for waste-to-products research and energy process safety, as well as general-purpose scientific assistance, demonstrating its cross-domain applicability.