Architecting Reliable Knowledge Retrieval Systems Using Large Language Models

Abstract

The increasing deployment of large language models (LLMs) in enterprise environments creates reliability challenges related to hallucination, factual inconsistency, limited knowledge traceability, uncertainty, and operational efficiency. This study develops a literature-based architectural framework for reliable knowledge retrieval systems that separates external knowledge management from LLM-based reasoning and generation. The framework synthesizes architectural mechanisms for knowledge representation, hybrid retrieval, reranking, evidence selection, context construction, response verification, provenance tracking, uncertainty handling, guardrails, and computational efficiency. The resulting architecture organizes these mechanisms into coordinated layers that control the flow of external evidence from knowledge sources to generated responses while supporting traceability and controlled abstention when sufficient evidence is unavailable. The architectural synthesis further identifies complementary strategies for enterprise deployment, including semantic caching, model routing, and human oversight, to balance reliability, scalability, and operational cost. The analysis indicates that reliable LLM deployment should be treated as an end-to-end architectural problem rather than solely a model-performance problem, with knowledge access, evidence quality, verification, provenance, and governance functioning as integrated system components. The proposed framework provides a structured foundation for designing maintainable, auditable, and reliable knowledge retrieval systems for enterprise and other high-stakes applications