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  Schmitt-Rennekamp  Walter 
 

Digital documentation trends for aircraft maintenance

 

Abstract

 The aviation industry has a long tradition in information interchange conventions between airplane manufacturers and airlines. In aircraft maintenance and operations documentation structure and form are well defined by the ATA SPEC 100 specification. It was a good foundation bringing that documentation into electronic form using SGML. SGML is today the foundation for ATA SPEC 2100, the aviation standard for electronic document interchange.
 Authoring, production, distribution and usage of aircraft maintenance documents are pretty complex processes. The reasons are the number of documents, the size, the complexity in structure, the customization and effectivity rules, and the revision regulations. For example Lufthansa aircraft maintenance moves around 90 Million pages and 90.000 microfilms a year.
 The first generation of electronic documentation was an electronic copy of the paper document. Step by step the producer of Technical Documentation - Aircraft Technical Publications - and the airline users get an idea of the chances of tagged information. In the future, documentation has to move from the document paradigm to an information paradigm. That means document component management gives us the chance to reduce redundancy. In addition external links are first steps to overcome the limitation of a single document. Both reduction of redundancy and the intensive use of links has to go hand in hand. At the end of this process the user gets an 'Information Web' and exactly the information he is looking for.
 Tagged information at a well defined granularity makes incremental revisions easy. Taking advantage of the progress in electronic networks, an on-line document update will be possible and leads to totally new worksharing concepts between aircraft manufacturers product support organization and airline engineering.
 Triggered through the Internet success story there is a strong trend in the aviation industry providing document information on-line. SITA the branch network provider has launched an aviation Intranet recently. The major players in aircraft production are working on remote accessible document - or information - repositories.
 80% or more of the information running the aircraft maintenance business today are stored in paper documents. Tagged electronic documentation gives us the chance to make this information directly usable. That means electronic document management systems and 'classical' relational data repositories have to be integrated. The previous mentioned 'information web' has to be extended by non-document information like spares, jobs, accounting, costs and so on.
 Mobile computing arises from the laboratory stage to professional hardware and wireless networks. In the near future, the first mobile systems will be installed in a test field. Aircraft engineers will have the complete documentation on-line available on their inspection tour, as well as all additional information like fault history and task information. Electronic sign-off and an intensive dialog between the mobile device and the back-office computer system on the one side, the onboard diagnostic computer on the other side, will be possible. Those technologies will tear down one of the last fields of dominance for paper documents.
 Lufthansa Systems has experiences in different application fields as well as in different degrees of ripeness concerning tagged electronic documentation.
 In the field of troubleshooting Lufthansa Systems has experiences with an seamless information flow of low structured fault information. It starts from an in-flight discrepancy, basically detected by the onboard maintenance computer. The information will be classified by the pilot and when necessary handed over from an onboard maintenance computer via satellite communication to the ground station. At the ground station, the warnings and messages will be processed, references generated and analyzed by maintenance mechanics. A direct hyperlink with troubleshooting and maintenance documentation makes navigation in different maintenance documents easy. Troubleshooting organization and manufacturer's help desk can be linked in, if necessary by video conferencing and supported by multimedia information.
 In the field of routine maintenance, an intense interweave has to be done with document information, other non-document base information and the production system. For example airlines have systems in place for recording daily flight hours and landing cycles. A system has to supervise when an aircraft system or component has to be changed for overhaul. The information when an action has to be done, is described in one document the information how to proceed the maintenance task is described in another manual. To bring those information in the needed granularity with the document specific attributes like revisions and effectivity on-line in a production environment is the challenge of the near future.
 The usage of webbed information, tailored and precise at any needed location makes aircraft maintenance not only cost efficient, it has as well a strong impact on how aircraft maintenance has to be done.
 
 
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