Some Real World Examples

The aircraft guided diagnostic service is ideal for users at all levels of expertise. Experienced technicians unfamiliar with an aircraft can be fully up to speed in very little time. It's as if they have an expert on their shoulder asking discriminating questions.

You can free your resident experts from solving routine problems that can be handled by others, allowing your most experienced people to focus on the never-before-seen problems that can best use their knowledge and expertise. And of course, once a new problem gets solved, it is seamlessly added to the knowledgebase where everyone has access to the new knowledge.

CaseBank has made it easy for your technicians to work with the aircraft guided diagnostic service. First of all, it's intuitive. A technician simply enters one or two visible symptoms, and then a dialogue begins with point-and-click ease. The software presents a series of discriminating questions that lead the troubleshooter directly to the most relevant situations.

With its Hybrid Reasoning engine, you are able to work around areas where knowledge is incomplete and, using Fuzzy Logic, can find all relevant solutions even where the information provided is similar to but not exactly the same as what is in the stored knowledgebase.

The aircraft guided diagnostic service's unique ability to discriminate between multiple configurations of aircraft, from fleet down to an individual aircraft, ensures that a troubleshooter is presented with relevant information only. SpotLight - your own private expert guide to solving problems.

CaseBank's unique guided diagnostic subscription service for airlines can improve the efficiency and safety of your aircraft operations by bringing experience from across the industry to your troubleshooters. This service uses CaseBank Technologies' proven software, "SpotLight®," which delivers expert diagnostic guidance for solving equipment and process problems, and a knowledgebase of the results and lessons learned from successful troubleshooting experiences. SpotLight delivers these experiences to your people in time to help, wherever and whenever similar problems appear. No risky development. No management burden. Just speedy, guided access to highly relevant knowledge.

With the aircraft guided diagnostic service, CaseBank provides an ever-ready global "collective memory" loaded with the compiled experiences of the industry's experts. Your guide never goes off shift, never takes a vacation, never changes jobs, and never retires. The wealth of knowledge from an entire industry's experienced troubleshooters will always be available, no matter what.

Past diagnostic experiences are captured and compiled in a knowledgebase called a "knowledgebase". Each individual solution documents the entire set of symptoms that distinguishes it from similar solutions. Each solution also documents the root cause of the fault and the known, successful corrective actions.

An aircraft guided diagnostic knowledgebase is extraordinarily concise, since one solution is used to represent all instances of a particular type of fault. Users are not deluged with records of each occurrence. Rather, each solution comprises a unique set of characteristics that clearly distinguish each problem from all others. Only relevant information is included.

CaseBank provides subscribers with access to a secure, central knowledgebase created and maintained by CaseBank. With the help of industry experts, CaseBank reviews subscribers' maintenance experiences and, once the root cause of a problem has been verified and all related information validated, and prepares a new solution for inclusion.

Failure to resolve unexpected faults (elusive faults) on the first attempt can result in rapidly escalating costs and operational disruptions due to flight cancellations, gate delays, unsubstantiated part removals, complete out-of-service periods, and unplanned overtime and shift bonuses.

Elusive faults are the most difficult type of fault that technicians can face because they are not always correctly addressed by existing diagnostics aids, such as built-in tests or fault-isolation manuals. These problems are often characterized by intermittent symptoms, possibly caused by unpredictable conditions such as aging, environmental factors, or manufacturing error.

Elusive faults consume a disproportionate share of the unplanned maintenance-related expenses due to the difficulty of determining their root cause. Troubleshooters often have no convenient or timely way of knowing that another mechanic has encountered a similar problem and has solved it already. Until now, they've been on their own and often in the dark about how to find a solution quickly.

A maintenance technician, newly endorsed on an aircraft, is assigned for the first time to this type of aircraft. Although he is experienced on other aircraft, he still feels a certain uneasiness. Aircraft are very complex. There is no possible way for the new technician to become an instant expert. His classroom training gave him a basic understanding of how the aircraft systems work normally and how they are repaired, but he knows that these complex systems don't always fail in predictable ways. In many cases the manuals do not help – he must rely on the help of more experienced technicians who have seen such failures before. The only problem is that the technicians with that experience never seem to be around when needed.

When he arrives at the aircraft and checks the logbook, the technician finds that a critical system is failing intermittently. The pilots are complaining about unreliable operation. Following the troubleshooting manual does not isolate the fault. He tries swapping computers, but to no avail. Is it a software bug? An intermittent hardware component? A chafed wire somewhere in the miles of wiring that run through the aircraft? He suspects another technician may know the solution to this problem, but he has no idea where to find that person. He involves more and more people in the troubleshooting, and changes more and more parts. Soon, the Station Operations Center is screaming to get the aircraft back into operation. Finally, the solution is found. It turns out that there is a connector on the aft pressure bulkhead that has corroded, causing intermittent behavior in the system. Now the new technician knows something that very few other technicians know.

With CaseBank's guided diagnostic support, had this problem been seen before, the technician would have been quickly guided to it. If not, then this solution has already been captured by the software, and after expert validation, would be made available to the next technician who is presented with the problem.

Here's an example of how the CaseBank solutions can save time and money. An airliner was ready to take off when a problem was discovered: there was no airflow in the cabin. Although it was obvious that something was wrong, the aircraft's built-in test systems showed everything to be working correctly. The flight had to be canceled while repair technicians investigated the problem. Three hours later, a technician found the source of the fault - a loose pipe fitting in the tail of the aircraft. Once the fault was located, it was repaired in a matter of minutes and the aircraft was released for service.

In the next few months, at that same airline, the same problem occurred three more times on different aircraft at different locations. In each case it was necessary to cancel the flight. None of the technicians assigned to find the problem knew that it had occurred before. If CaseBank solutions had been available, the guided diagnostic troubleshooting would have alerted them to the findings of the technician who solved the original problem, and the last three cancellations could have been avoided, with a significant saving in cost and customer satisfaction for the airline.

In February 2000, an unusual brake problem grounded a British Airways Concorde flight from London to New York at a total cost to BA operations of over $800,000. The fault turned out to be a simple sensor failure. It took a whole day to troubleshoot, but the fix was simple and fast once they found the cause. Later, when a case history was forwarded to BA's commercial partner, Air France, BA was astonished by their reply: "We know - the same thing happened to us last year - we sent you a report on it".

The costly delay would have been avoided if the British Airways technician in London had been shown the story about Air France's experience when the problem symptoms first appeared. That's what the ADDS Service does.