A Comparative Benchmark of Large Language Models for Labelling Wind Turbine Maintenance Logs

Abstract

Effective Operation and Maintenance (O&M) is critical to reducing the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) from wind power, yet the unstructured, free-text nature of turbine maintenance logs presents a significant barrier to automated analysis. Our paper addresses this by presenting a novel and reproducible framework for benchmarking Large Language Models (LLMs) on the task of classifying these complex industrial records. To promote transparency and encourage further research, this framework has been made publicly available as an open-source tool. We systematically evaluate a diverse suite of state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source LLMs, providing a foundational assessment of their trade-offs in reliability, operational efficiency, and model calibration. Our results quantify a clear performance hierarchy, identifying top models that exhibit high alignment with a benchmark standard and trustworthy, well-calibrated confidence scores. We also demonstrate that classification performance is highly dependent on the task's semantic ambiguity, with all models showing higher consensus on objective component identification than on interpretive maintenance actions. Given that no model achieves perfect accuracy and that calibration varies dramatically, we conclude that the most effective and responsible near-term application is a Human-in-the-Loop system, where LLMs act as a powerful assistant to accelerate and standardise data labelling for human experts, thereby enhancing O&M data quality and downstream reliability analysis.