EngiAI: Capability-Based Evaluation of Tool-Connected LLM Agents for Engineering Design

Abstract

Engineering-agent systems are proliferating, but differences in tasks, tools, and success criteria make demonstrations difficult to compare and failures difficult to diagnose. We introduce a capability-based evaluation framework for tool-connected engineering agents. The framework separately evaluates workflow execution, retrieval-assisted parameter selection, high-performance computing (HPC) orchestration, and training-code authoring using execution traces and resulting engineering artifacts. We evaluate four LLM backends on the EngiBench Beams2D and Photonics2D problems using EngiAI, a LangGraph reference implementation. On Beams2D, the two proprietary models complete 96-97% of workflow tasks, compared with 55-78% for the two open-source models. Workflows requiring tool-based decision-making perform worse on Photonics2D, reaching 20-53% completion. Indexed retrieval improves parameter selection. For HPC orchestration, Gemini-3-Flash completes every tested pipeline, whereas GPT-5-mini completes 50-70% through the final evaluation step. When the agents must write the training code themselves, they fill small gaps reliably but diverge as larger regions are left open. In the open-synthesis tier, both proprietary models select conditional variational autoencoders instead of the reference conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN); Gemini-3-Flash achieves lower maximum mean discrepancy than the reference in seven of ten Beams2D trials. The results support capability-specific evaluation, with separate scores for distinct skills, rather than assessment through successful end-to-end demonstrations alone. The framework provides common evaluation dimensions for identifying failure mechanisms and structuring comparisons of models, agent architectures, and tool interfaces.

42 pages, 17 figures, 15 tables. Extended version of work presented at the ASME 2026 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC-CIE 2026), Houston, Texas, USA, August 23-26, 2026. Submitted to the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design