Fault knowledge management in aircraft maintenance

An aircraft is complex system with a great number of electronic products and mechanical equipments, and numerous faults failed to be inspected in aircraft maintenance. In most circumstance, it requires specialists to detect, diagnose and redress faults. The expert knowledge is an important aid in aircraft maintenance. This paper proposes a knowledge management method based on much maintenance experience and professional knowledge accumulated in practical maintenance support process and applies the method into aircraft maintenance. It introduces a hierarchy classification of fault concepts and properties, and defines the representation of fault knowledge and discusses the semantic expansion based on ontology modeling technology. In addition, it realizes semantic similarity retrieval with K-nearest neighbor method. Finally, a fault knowledge management system is developed and applied in the aircraft manufacturing enterprise.