Server-Side XML: Taming the Tower of Babel   Table of contents   Indexes   Web Template Design: The Need for New Tools
 

A Standards Based Automotive Electronic Service Manual

 American Honda Motor Co., Inc. 
 California 
Kamiya, Seiji
 Torrance 
 USA 
 		Seiji  Kamiya
Staff Analyst,  American Honda Motor Co., Inc. 
 1919 Torrance Blvd. Mail Stop: 500-2C-11A
Torrance  (California)  (USA) 90501 
Email: skamiya@amerhonda.com

Biographical notice

 American Honda chose CGM as a core technology for its authoring repository requirements.
 

Background

 Several years ago American Honda began a movement to consolidate Honda's vehicle service and repair information resources into databases located in Japan and the United States. ISIS (Integrated Service Information System) is Honda's architecture plan for the eventual integration of all service-related information that will be going out to the dealerships in a form accessible through a service bay computer system. ISIS defines the relationships and structures of information from the most detailed level of information to the most general navigational paths.
 This project, ISIS, was originally started in 1993 as a joint effort between the Service Technical division of the Honda Motor Company based in Japan and the Service Technical division of American Honda Motors located in California. Honda actually began this project for several reasons. It recognized a need to transition into a fully computerized publishing and distribution environment to meet the demands of today's government requirements, to reduce cost, increase efficiency, and to meet the needs of the dealerships.
 Many of Honda's competitors have already put into production computer databases used for accessing diagnostic and repair information. The general trend of the market is to move away from the production of paper parts catalogs, technical bulletins, news articles, and training material towards a comprehensive computer application that will provide diagnostics and repair information that is fully cross referenced across all traditional publications and is constantly updated.
 When Honda began the project it had the following objectives:
 
  • Meet or exceed US Government regulations for providing service information to the appropriate customers.
    •  
  • Provide Honda/Acura dealership technicians with the best and most current diagnostics and repair information in an easy to use form.
    •  
  • Use as much of the existing systems as possible to be able to produce paper service manuals and electronic books.
    •  
  • Make a universal repository of re-usable diagnostics and repair information.
    •  

    Government Regulations:

     This project also began as a reaction to possible government regulations requiring the manufacturers of automobiles to distribute emission related diagnostic and service information to the after-market distributors of service information in a standardized form.
     In 1990 Congress passed the Clear Air Act Amendment, which basically requires automotive manufacturers to provide diagnostics and repair information for vehicle systems that could affect emissions levels or face heavy fines and the possibility of no receiving certification to sell vehicles in the United States. California also passed similar requirements.
     ISIS was developed in reaction to EPA and California Air Resources Board regulations. Much of the original design of ISIS is based on the SAE J2008
     Recommended Organization of Vehicle Service Information. ISIS has modified an early version of SAE J2008 to match Honda's business requirements.
     

    Improve Diagnostics and Repair Information:

     To retain ownership loyalty, it is important to minimize the chances of incorrect maintenance and repairs. The dealerships need access to the correct information as quickly as possible. The accessibility of information will improve the success rate of "Fixed Right the First Time" statistics.
     

    Use as Much of the Existing Systems as Possible:

     Prior to the development of the ISIS project, Honda Motor developed the Honda Computerized Publishing (HCP) and Honda Computerized Illustration (HCI) systems. One of the objectives of working together with Honda Motor in Japan was to utilize the compositions system and its components for developing the service manual. This system is designed to support the entire world market so developing an entirely new system would be very expensive.
     

    Repository of Data:

     The original goal of ISIS was to develop a central repository of service information for the world market. All countries developing service information could utilize the contents of the database to develop localized service information. This will reduce the cost of development of service information for the entire world and allow for quick development of various books for the same source of information.
     Critical to this project is selecting the correct formats for text and graphics. Honda realized that choosing any data format basically means a very long-term commitment. To avoid as much technical risk as possible, American Honda Motors proposed using ISO standards for encoding the data. SGML, TIFF, and CGM were chosen as the standards for ISIS.
     

    Additional Objectives:

     American Honda Motor Co. is also committed to distributing service information using the Internet to authorized information customers. The changes in the technology and the general trend towards using the Internet are a strong motivation for Honda to provide service information over the Internet. The Internet reduces the need for expensive additional hardware and software plus has the benefit of providing the ability to distribute information immediately to the dealerships.
     

    Illustrations

     Honda has several objectives for illustrations it must meet in order for the ISIS project to succeed. Honda's service information is graphic intensive. In other manufacturer's information, graphics support the explanations provided in the text. In Honda's case most repair and diagnostic procedures are illustrated with graphics with only a minimal amount of details within supporting text. This increases the readability of our technical manuals. For this reason, illustrations are an important aspect of Honda's service information.
     

    Illustration Project Issues:

     
  • Convert all illustrations into one of several selected computer graphics formats
    •  
  • Conversion of HCI files (Honda Motors proprietary CAD format) to CGM
    •  
  • Distribution of illustrations on the Internet
    •  
  • Viewing and Editing illustrations during authoring at AHM
    •  

    Prior to ISIS:

     Prior to ISIS all technical illustrations were created by hand from photographs or actual sample parts. The technical illustrator would develop isometric views of the illustrations drawing them freehand using pen and paper or draw them using a software package.
     Several vendors were used for preparing the illustrations. As many as six different companies created parts of the service manual for Honda the actual source of the artwork used to create the pages for the service manuals. Because almost all of the page composition for the service manuals was handled entirely by the printing vendors, standardization of graphical formats was not a requirement.
     Illustration were created in the following forms:
     
  • Scans of ink drawings
    •  
  • Adobe Illustrator files
    •  
  • Fujitsu ICAD files
    •  
  • Autocad files
    •  
  • Adobe PhotoShop files
    •  
  • Interleaf drawings (American Honda only)
    •  

    TIFF Scans:

     Some complicated illustrations such as cut-away views of entire engines are difficult to create using a computer. These illustrations can take a specialized graphics designs firm as much as 2 months to create by hand. Honda really doesn't have a choice in this situation. The most cost-effective way to digitize these types of illustrations is by scanning them in. Fortunately there are few illustrations of this type.
     

    Adobe Illustrator:

     Japan's primary vendor created all its illustrations for Honda using Adobe Illustrator, which was fine for the vendor; however, as Honda began taking back much of the work and hosting it on its own servers, the space requirements for the illustrations was considered cost prohibitive. A more compact format was required.
     

    Interleaf:

     American Honda produced a lot of technical bulletins, as well as occasional corrections to service manual pages created by Honda Motor. American Honda has been using Interleaf for about 8 years. Interleaf is a comprehensive and efficient tool for creating illustrations. However, Interleaf has poor support for exporting its native graphical format to other formats. Interleaf used lots of splines, which can not be exported to another graphical format without loss of edibility. Honda has tried many filters for Interleaf, but has not found a package that produces acceptable results.
     

    Autocad:

     One of Honda's vendors uses Autocad for producing all of Honda's Electrical Troubleshooting Manual schematics. Honda at this point has not made any decisions to maintain a database of schematic illustrations for authoring purposes. Honda is perfectly happy to leave the development of this manual up to the vendor. So, there is little need to abandon the Autocad format and use a standardized format. It will however convert the Autocad files into another format to distribute over the Internet.
     

    HCI:

     At the time American Honda was proposing the development of ISIS, Honda Motor in Japan was beginning to use HCI, the Honda Computerized Illustration software package. At the time HCI was first developed it could handle several different languages, more lines, and more layers than any other commercially available software packages and it is still much easier to learn and use than illustration packages available today.
     HCI is a purpose built, fast, and efficient Bezier vector graphics format. Up to 100 illustrations could fit on a single 1.2Mb floppy disk. The average size of a complete illustration is about 10Kb without compression.
     Honda developed the software package about 8 years ago with a technology partner. The system will run on any Intel platform; however, the software can not be re-written to output more popular formats. The system uses a now defunct windows system. Almost all of the illustrations produced in Japan are with HCI. Honda has no plans to replace HCI with another application. There are several reasons for this:
     
  • Honda Motor produces the entire service manual in Japan using HCI. In Honda Motors case, the HCI package is integrated into their entire book publishing process. Several major applications would have to be rewritten in order to utilize another software package.
    •  
  • If Honda used other commercially available software packages, 5 years worth of data for Honda could require as much as 40Gb of storage space even with compression for each language. It is possible to store the same amount of illustrations using CGM or HCI in about 10Gb.
    •  
  • All the technical illustrators would need to be retrained to use another software package. The productivity level would decrease. The schedule for production of illustrations would be adversely affected. Several hundreds of thousands of dollars would need to be invested across several companies in order to being a new system into production. Honda would be at risk of problems with bugs that could affect the production schedule of producing its service manuals.
    •  

    What to Do:

     Ideally, Honda Japan would produce all illustrations for American Honda using the specified CGM format. However, changing Honda Japan's production process is unlikely. The decision was made to convert all illustrations produced in Japan into either CGM or TIFF.
     

    Problems Encountered With Filtering:

     In order to gain control of the information, Honda has basically standardized its computer graphics formats to DXF, HCI, and CGM for the authoring environment and selected JPEG and GIF for output formats until CGM become a supported Internet format. The format of 90% of the illustrations stored in the American Honda ISIS database is converted to CGM format. CGM has been chosen as the standard that meets with American Honda's authoring repository requirements
     Honda decided from the beginning that it did not want to support or use HCI for American Honda Motor Corporation. This forced American Honda to look for a CGM technology partner. American Honda Motor Co. selected INSO Boulder (Henderson Software Incorporated) to develop a filter application that would convert the HCI format to CGM. In theory this is any easy task to convert to CGM because of the CGM's flexibility.
     The original plan for the filter was to install it in the Japanese authoring system. To accomplish this, Honda created a testing and development system nearly identical to the system in Japan. All of the development work was done in the United States using a Sun SPARC system configured with Japanese operating system.
     The simplicity of the HCI graphics specification proved to be deceptive, a lot of time and effort has been spent understanding the encoding of the line information and the text information. Also the HCI software is not adequately documented. Many discrepancies were discovered in the original documentation for the software package. Fonts, graphic libraries, and consistency of the source data, all these areas affected the quality of conversion of the graphics.
     In Honda's case, it could not use the same fonts on both the Japan system and the USA system. This was a problem initially for the filter application. The font metrics for the native fonts used in HCI are not available. A rough interpolation of the expansion factor is used in the filter application to estimate the correct size and position translations for the text written within the illustrations. Not having an accurate translation between both illustrations packages forces special precautions when drafting the illustrations to avoid text covering up parts of the illustration or other text.
     Special character mappings also provided some minor problems. Honda like other manufactures uses symbols that are specific to our illustrations or industry. These characters can be considered profile specific extensions to CGM. These are symbols such as the center dot symbol or liter symbol, which are not included in all CGM profiles.
     There have also been problems with software working correctly on the testing and development system but producing different results on the production system in Japan. A lot of time and effort has gone into trouble shooting the differences between Japan's computing environment and the US development system, which should have been identical to the Japan system. The one solution to this problem was to bring conversion process back to the United States so that it would be easier to troubleshoot problems. This turned out to be the better than working out the problems with a system that local programmers could not get easy access to.
     Despite a series of problems with developing a filter, Honda has succeeded in having a filter created that converts HCI into CGM. There are still minor issues that need to be fixed before the filter is 100% correct.
     

    Distribution of the Illustrations:

     At the time Honda began developing ISIS there were no CGM viewers which supported a higher version than CGM level 1. To just view the Japanese illustrations, Honda requires at least a CGM Level 3 viewer, which supports Bezier vector graphics. Honda contracted INSO to develop of two types of viewers, one to work with INSO Corporations DynaText and one to work with Netscape and Internet Explore. The applications work well and have been integrated into Honda's viewer. Honda has not made a firm commitment to either approaches yet; however, current testing looks promising.
     

    CGM Profile

     Honda had to develop a Honda CGM Profile that is close enough to established industry profiles to allow Honda to modify its illustrations later as other profiles specific for our industry evolved. The major issue was with the using intelligent information in the CGM illustrations. There was little precedence or recommendations as to what would be acceptable for the automotive industry to use as its standard for hotspot encoding. At the time J2008 did not attempt to address intelligent graphics and considered them as non-compliant capabilities of manufacture specific information to be given only to franchised dealerships. Honda therefore based its CGM profile on the ATA 2100 profile which had already defined the encoding method for intelligent information for the airline industry. The Honda profile is more or less a subset of the ATA profile. By electing the ATA profile as a basis for the Honda profile, Honda was attempting to reduce the risk of incompatibility with future CGM tools.
     

    Good Application of Intelligent CGM:

     One of the future applications of CGM that Honda has considered is Electrical Troubleshooting Manuals, which is created in the United States. The ETM is considered a supplement for the service manual. In future releases of ISIS, the ETM and the service manual will be combined together as one ISIS resourse. The current paper version of the ETM is one of the most important technical publications provided to the dealership technicians. The ETM shows the technician how the current flows through all the systems and components on a vehicle. By testing segments of circuits for continuity, it is possible to find probable sources of electrical problems by process of elimination of good circuit segments. CGM offers the opportunity to create interactive schematic illustrations that can help the technicians diagnose probable sources of electrical problems.
     Once ISIS becomes available in the dealerships as a computerized application, it will be logical to follow up with the ETM. To make it an interactive application that will contain a series of links and hotspots to quickly take the technical to the next system, circuit, or component that should be tested. Once the technician finds the probable fault, then ISIS will provide the ability to search for the testing and repair or replacement procedures.
     The main reason for looking into CGM for ETMs is the relative easy at embedding information necessary for processing links. The ability to convert CGMs into a human readable form called Clear Text Encoding provides the opportunity to write fairly simple code to insert and update hotspot information, links, and even notes about any object within the CGM.
     In Honda's case this allows us to maintain the linking information for an illustration because all the information about the hotspots and any attributes needed for processing with a database are all contained within the illustration. This is a different approach than an overlay model for creating hotspots, where the details of the hotspots are in a separate file or within the markup of the SGML/XML instance.
     The encoding of all the attributes within Applications Structures (APS) within the CGM encapsulates the information so that it can be easier to reuse as an object for other applications if the data is designed well. For ETMs, the vendor proposed using an intelligent code that could identify the circuit or component located on the schematic diagram. When authoring the schematic, it should be possible to drop in a key for the circuit or component from a database. The key could then be used to find information about that circuit or component from ISIS.
     The other good reason to use CGM for the ETM is the clarity of the image on screen and in the printed out form. Clearly vector graphics have less problems associated with varying needs of the resolution of the screen or paper. Plus the space requirements for the illustrations is much smaller than compressed raster formats such as JPEG, TIFF, or GIF. Because of the limitations of presentation of illustrations on the screen of a computer monitor, it is important to provide the technician with the ability to zoom in and pan around in illustrations to make some of the details more visible.
     Generally speaking technical illustrations are not dense in terms of the amount of details that are in the illustrations. This is to avoid confusion and to make the illustrations more viewable. However, once the image is viewed on screen there tends to be a problem with clarity and the lack of ability to see the image up close as the technician is working on the vehicle. This is especially true in the case of a technician working with a PC attached to a portable cabinet. The technician wants to avoid walking back and forth between the PC and the vehicle. To allow the technician to read the information from a further distance, it is important to provide the technician with the ability to magnify the illustrations. CGM offers these capabilities to create this type of application using a database to manage the linking information. Other graphical formats can also do this as well. Given the requirements of the automotive industry, CGM is a logical choice for this type of application.
    Server-Side XML: Taming the Tower of Babel   Table of contents   Indexes   Web Template Design: The Need for New Tools