Contextualising aircraft maintenance documentation

Abstract

The use of documentation for task support in aircraft line maintenance is still mostly paper-based, which is slow, burdensome and prone to error. This paper provides an overview of the issues associated with the use of paper-based documentation in aircraft line maintenance and describes the development of a novel concept for contextualised documentation to address these issues. Using ontology-based data access, the system is able to retrieve relevant documents approximately twice as fast as existing relational database systems and provides support for a wide variety of file types. Limitations of the developed system are software vendor dependency, compatibility issues between integrated software solutions and lack of support for automatic mappings. Nevertheless, the developed system provides a proof of concept for a mobile tool to overcome the weaknesses of maintenance documentation in line maintenance, working towards increased operational efficiency, reduction of human factor induced maintenance errors and reduced paper consumption.