MaintenanceMate™: An Intelligent Troubleshooting Agent for Advanced Maintenance

As weapon systems continue to grow both in numbers and sophistication, they pose an ever-increasing challenge to the maintainer community in terms of speed and accuracy of problem diagnosis and detection of incipient system failure or degradation. What maintainers need to meet this challenge is the ability to rapidly troubleshoot complex systems. Achieving this outcome requires sophisticated analytical reasoning ability and experience which few maintainers can be expected to have. It is this recognition that provides the impetus for developing an intelligent troubleshooting agent (ITA) that appears to the maintainer as a systems expert. This agent will be capable of rapid learning and close interaction with the maintainer. Phase I of this effort will employ current weapon platforms as a test bed to demonstrate the troubleshooting capabilities of the agent in diagnosing operational failure and degradation while assisting minimally experienced junior maintainers. Phase I will compare and contrast the advantages of the proposed solution relative to existing methods.