Aircraft dispatch involves determining the optimal dispatch option when an aircraft experiences an unexpected failure. Currently, maintenance technicians at the apron have limited access to support information and finding the right information in extensive maintenance manuals is a time-consuming task, often leading to technically induced delays. This paper introduces a novel web-based prototype decision support system to aid technicians during aircraft dispatch decisionmaking and subsequent maintenance execution. A system architecture for real-time dispatch decision support is established and implemented. The developed system is evaluated through a case study in an operational environment by licensed maintenance technicians. The system fully automates information retrieval from multiple data sources, performs alternative identification and evaluation for a given fault message, and provides the technician with on-site access to relevant information, including the related maintenance tasks. The case study indicates a potential time saving of up to 98% per dispatch decision. Moreover, it enables digitalization of the—currently mostly paperbased— dispatch decision process, thereby reducing logistics and paper waste. The prototype is the first to provide operational decision support in the aircraft maintenance domain and addresses the lack of correlation between theory and practice often found in decision support systems research by providing a representative case study. The developed custom parser for SGML-based documents enables efficient identification and extraction of relevant information, vastly contributing to the overall reduction of the decision time.
Delays are costly to airlines in both money and image. A significant number of delays is caused by unexpected technical failures of aircraft systems or components. These failures, if not dealt with efficiently, can cause disruptions in the flight schedule and network. The annual costs of these type of disruptions add up to an estimated cost of €2.8 billion in Europe alone. Determining the optimal course of action when an unexpected failure occurs is currently troublesome, leading to inefficient dispatch decision making. To minimize flight disruptions caused by unexpected failures, this research aims to optimize the dispatch assessment process by automating data collection and processing, and aid the AMT in decision making. For this purpose, a DSS framework was developed in cooperation with an airline and implemented through a use case. The framework includes the database detailing the individual sources, a 6-step decision making model and a user interface developed for mobile access. The resulting mobile tool has received positive feedback from end users and brings direct decision support for unexpected events to the workplace of the technician (i.e., the platform), while maintaining the ability to exploit the technician's expertise. Further novelty is added to the domain by including operational procedures in the research, closing the gap between theory and practice.
Biographical notes: Hemmo Koornneef obtained his MSc at the Delft University of Technology and currently works there on obtaining his PhD at the section of Air Transport and Operations. His research focuses on aircraft maintenance operations, in particular improving efficiency of line maintenance operations by developing knowledge-based (mobile) tools to aid technicians in task execution and decision making. AbstractThe use of documentation for task support in aircraft line maintenance is still mostly paperbased, 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 maintenance and describes the development of a novel concept for contextualized documentation to address these issues. The developed system features ontology-based data access (OBDA) for improved contextualization and additional flexibility for future integration of other data sources. The ontology is developed in Protégé. The maintenance documents are accessed through the FileTable feature of Microsoft's SQL Server and is linked to the ontology using Ontop. By inferencing the aircraft manufacturer and family are derived from the registration mark and used as attributes for a Boolean search in the maintenance documentation database.The OBDA 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.
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