Maintenance Enhancement with Next-Generation Development of Skills (MENDS)

Navy systems maintainers are being asked to maintain increasingly complex systems with fewer maintainers and, therefore, less time for each task and less mentoring from experienced maintainers. Current training practice is not sufficient for this environment because it does not focus on creating robust, adaptable skills that give the trainee background knowledge and troubleshooting experience to solve new problems. To meet this need, we will design and demonstrate the feasibility of Maintenance Enhancement with Next-Generation Development of Skills (MENDS). MENDS is a next-generation maintenance training system and immersive game-based training environment with empirically validated training protocols, assessment tools, and models of skill acquisition and decay. MENDS features (1) the KRK theory of learning and retention applied to maintenance training; (2) an immersive game-based maintenance simulation built on DiSTIs GLStudio; (3) the D2P tutoring framework with mobile skill refreshing; and (4) our methodology for annotated skill trees (MAST) to represent and assess trainee skills. MENDS provides empirically-validated, robust training that improves critical cognitive skills required for adaptive fault diagnosis and repair.