Improving the Effectiveness and the Efficiency of the Some Operations in Maintenance Processes Using Dynamic Taxonomies

The purpose of this work is to increase the effectiveness and the efficiency of some operations carried out during the activities in the aeronautical maintenance and transformation processes. In particular, we examine the Non-Routine Card (NRC) Resolution and the Activity Planning Processes. An NRC is a fault, not expected, detected during the maintenance/transformation operations. The costs and the efforts of the NRC management are of the same order of magnitude of the a priori scheduled activities. The process requires that corrective actions come from applicable technical documentation. There are many kinds of defects and technical documentation does not cover all possible cases. Often, we observed the operators refer to similar NRC solved in the past. Therefore, the operators browse the set of NRCs. We found two major issues: the enormous number of NRC and the lack of a shared and concrete definition of similarity between NRCs. The latter is due to a distinctive feature of the NRCs. The operators find ¿similar¿ NRCs using their expertise. On other hand, the Activity Planning process requires the periodic re-calculation of the optimal schedule of the maintenance activities due to the presence of NRCs. The upgrading of the schedule is a very time consuming task. NRC management and activity planning share common problems. Both of them require searching and browsing large set of items by specialized technicians. We propose a common approach for the two problems. The application we developed relies on the concept of dynamic taxonomy.