Maintenance/ Monitoring Support Information Tools

Military communications and weapons systems depend on the health of their components to perform reliably over extended periods of time. Maintenance is an important aspect of reliability, assuring that the equipment is on line and operational when it is needed. Military-developed and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment now co-exist in complex military systems. The trend toward electronic/networked maintenance documentation presents an opportunity to improve maintainer effectiveness, but new tools must be developed to manage interactions between the information sources and maintainers. Instrumental Sciences, Inc. (ISI) proposes an Automated Multimedia Maintenance Support Tool (AMMST) based on the artificial intelligence field of cooperative multi-agent distributed work environments. Our approach combines the multi-agent architecture with statistical analysis and maintenance decision-making technology that ISI has developed for Predictive Fault Detection applications to produce a distributed information management tool set that gathers relevant information from diverse sources upon user request or maintenance scenario identification, combines and filters the information, then formats it for multimedia interactive presentation to the user. The primary objectives of the Phase I research are to (1) determine the feasibility of the AMMST concept and (2) characterize the potential of the tool to reduce downtime, and thus to improve system availability.