Automating Contextualized Maintenance Documentation

Abstract

Currently, task support information in aircraft maintenance is mostly provided using paper-based solutions, which are burdensome, slow and prone to error. Aircraft maintenance documentation contains vast amounts of information irrelevant for the task at hand and even for the simplest tasks multiple documents need to be consulted. Next to these issues with the documentation itself, Aircraft Maintenance Technicians (AMTs) have very limited on-site access to support information. These factors lead to 15–20% of hands-on-aircraft time being wasted on acquiring the right information or not using maintenance documentation for task support at all, risking maintenance error. This paper describes the development of a system for a first level of contextualization of maintenance documentation to simplify the retrieval of task support information. Combining a tailor-made ontology with a relational database system for Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA), maintenance documents relevant to a specific aircraft registration mark can be identified. The system contributes to the research field of knowledge management by using OBDA for selecting relevant maintenance documents stored in a regular file folder. Future work will focus on increasing the level of contextualization, development of a mobile tool for on-site access and prototype verification and validation in an operational environment.