A Virtual Member of a Community of Practice for the Society of Petroleum Engineers: From Prototype to Deployment

A virtual assistant called ATHENA, developed for the Society of Petroleum Engineers, improved productivity and performance equality among 75 professionals on well-planning tasks compared to a state-of-the-art RAG baseline, and has been integrated into the SPE Research Portal for deployment. The enhanced version, featuring multi-document retrieval, answer validation, and proactive dissemination, provides better support for knowledge-intensive tasks.

arXiv:2608.19199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe the evolution of a virtual assistant, called ATHENA, designed to support the capture, retrieval, and dissemination of knowledge for members of a Community of Practice CoP related to the Oil and Gas sector. An evaluation of a first prototype involving 75 professionals from the Society of Petroleum Engineering SPE showed that ATHENA dramatically improved both their productivity and performance equality on a set of realistic well-planning tasks compare to their use of a state-of-the-art RAG baseline system. However, the evaluation also identified areas for improvement. This paper describes technical advances to our first prototype in the areas of multi-document retrieval, support for answer validation, and more focused proactive dissemination. Evaluation results show that this enhanced version of ATHENA provides better support for completing knowledge-intensive tasks related to well planning than does a state-of-the-art baseline. ATHENA has been integrated into the SPE Research Portal and is being deployed for use by the society's membership.