Aerospace - Operators

Your mechanic in Chicago kept a plane
grounded for two days,
diagnosing a problem that another
airline�s mechanic in London
solved last month �

� if only he�d known.

Your Challenge

Keeping your planes flying, on schedule � your customers expect it, and the costs associated with delays and cancellations can mount quickly. However, there is also continual pressure to reduce maintenance costs as much as possible.

Your Environment

You operate complex aircraft with many sophisticated, interacting systems. Confounding problems appear at odd times and with unusual symptoms, wreaking havoc to the flight schedule
Deep down, you just know that this problem must have happened to someone else before, but you have no way of finding out if that is the case in any sort of reasonable time

Built-in Test results are vague and the fault isolation manuals take hours to work through
There are people in your organization who should know the answer to almost any problem, but they never seem to be on shift at the time and place the problems are occurring
Your central help desk is becoming a bottleneck, due in part to the fact that the experts who staff it spend a lot of their time giving answers to problems that they already know about thanks to their personal experience
�Trial & Error� parts swapping comes with high costs� but maintenance staff have no other options given the time pressures of getting the aircraft back into service
Many of your best troubleshooters are coming up for retirement or being recruited by your competitors, hampering your ability to provide time-efficient and cost-effective maintenance
Executive management is pressing for higher operational performance from their aircraft assets while continuing to constrain maintenance budgets
Newer aircraft are more complex and more reliable so that technicians see fewer faults and don�t build the experience base of their predecessors, yet those faults are increasingly difficult to isolate and rectify when the aircraft fails to diagnose itself correctly

The Solution

The solution is a diagnostic decision support system that guides maintenance staff in troubleshooting based on the real experiences of all operators on that type of aircraft � and once the root cause is determined, points to an appropriate repair procedure.

CaseBank�s Aircraft Diagnostic Decision Support (ADDS) Service is a subscription service for airline operators. Airline operators use this service to provide their maintenance staff with a unique and powerful troubleshooting tool, especially capable of accelerating the diagnosis of elusive faults.

The service has two main parts:

The decision support engine is CaseBank�s proprietary case-based reasoning engine, SpotLight, which has been designed specifically for complex equipment environments, focusing on the aerospace industry.
The knowledgebase is a repository of diagnostic knowledge for the particular aircraft type, developed by CaseBank�s specialized aircraft knowledgebase development staff.

The ADDS service is simple to use, easily fielded and:

Provides the airline with access to industry-wide, validated experience that exceeds their own
Acts as an expert mentor who works alongside the technician posing questions that quickly isolate the root cause of an aircraft fault � an assistant with a perfect memory
Enables first time fixes whether in a far-off or home base environment
Continuously captures new knowledge without additional burden on the technician
Never goes off shift, never takes a vacation, never changes jobs, and never retires
Tracks the troubleshooting activities, providing visibility to management
Is available at a low cost, on a subscription basis, with no up- front investment required for the software or the case-base development

The Benefits

Increased aircraft availability through faster fixes
Better aircraft at the start of the day through more frequent first-time fixes
Decreased logistics footprint through reduced spares pipeline
Decreased unsubstantiated part removals and related costs

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