# CeProAgents: A Hierarchical Agents System for Automated Chemical Process Development

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01654/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical and scientific domain agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 15 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Medical and scientific domain agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/medical-and-scientific-domain-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)
- [What Large Language Models Know and What People Think They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13835/) (2024)
- [SciToolAgent: A Knowledge Graph-Driven Scientific Agent for Multi-Tool Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20280/) (2025)
- [An Agentic Approach to Automatic Creation of P&ID Diagrams from Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12898/) (2024)
- [LLM-guided Chemical Process Optimization with a Multi-Agent Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20921/) (2025)
- [Multi-agent systems for chemical engineering: A review and perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07880/) (2025)
- [A multi-modal vision-language model for generalizable annotation-free pathology localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02044/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Manufacturing Scale-Up from Material Discovery Using Agentic Web Navigation and Retrieval-Augmented AI for Process Engineering Schematics Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05937/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Sketch2Simulation: Automating Flowsheet Generation via Multi Agent Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24629/) (2026)
- [CRAFTS: Collaborative Role-Adaptive Fine-Tuning of LLM Agents for Chemical Process Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01369/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The development of chemical processes, a cornerstone of chemical engineering, presents formidable challenges due to its multi-faceted nature, integrating specialized knowledge, conceptual design, and parametric simulation. Capitalizing on this, we propose CeProAgents, a hierarchical multi-agent system designed to automate the development of chemical process through collaborative division of labor. Our architecture comprises three specialized agent cohorts focused on knowledge, concept, and parameter respectively. To effectively adapt to the inherent complexity of chemical tasks, each cohort employs a novel hybrid architecture that integrates dynamic agent chatgroups with structured agentic workflows. To rigorously evaluate the system, we establish CeProBench, a multi-dimensional benchmark structured around three core pillars of chemical engineering. We design six distinct types of tasks across these dimensions to holistically assess the comprehensive capabilities of the system in chemical process development. The results not only confirm the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach but also reveal the transformative potential as well as the current boundaries of Large Language Models (LLMs) for industrial chemical engineering.