AgentAM: An AI Agent for Spatter- and Defect-Aware Process Optimization in Laser Powder Bed Fusion

Predictive models for laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) are rarely used on the shop floor because querying them requires programming and model-specific knowledge. We present AgentAM, a large language model (LLM) agent that gives process engineers natural-language access to CFD-trained surrogates of spatter and melt pool geometry for SS316L through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Polynomial surrogates trained on 279 single-track simulations predict melt pool dimensions ($R^2 \geq 0.95$) and spatter volume ($R^2 = 0.83$ on test data) at any power-velocity point in the trained range, and geometric criteria assign each point a geometry-derived defect regime (keyhole, lack of fusion, balling or stable) that matches the regime obtained from the simulated geometry in 93.4% of tracks under cross-validation. The agent selects and parameterizes tools for prediction, process-window scans and constrained optimization. Minimum-spatter optima often sat within 10 $μ$m of the lack-of-fusion boundary; a margin-aware optimizer moved them away from all thresholds and raised the estimated probability of remaining classified Good from 0.94 to 1.00 under an assumed 2% process drift, and from 0.72 to 0.91 when jointly sampled cross-validated geometry residuals were added. About 40-50 well-spread simulations sufficed to reproduce the defect map. To evaluate the agent layer, we introduce a 145-prompt benchmark scored against direct tool calls, plus eight prompts (40 runs) on margin-aware requests. Over the 725 runs of the main benchmark the agent passed the intended inputs in 98.5% of parsing prompts, reported the scored spatter values and defect classes faithfully and met every stated constraint in the 65 feasible optimization runs, within a median 1.0% of the brute-force optimum.