Avionics Maintenance Ontology Building for Failure Diagnosis Support.

In the aviation industry, the delay in maintaining or recovering aircrafts heavily impacts the profit of an airline company. Consequently the maintenance actions identification and planning of aircrafts is crucial. However, due to the complexity of the domain in terms of data sources, distributed systems and information availability, it is hard to provide automatic maintenance support. We propose to use semantic technologies to model the domain at a conceptual level through ontology, thus abstracting from the data sources and the maintenancers’uses and jobs. In this manner the information relevant for characterizing failures and maintenance events is encapsulated and provided to end users via an easier access, which otherwise would be inaccessible or would require expert analysis to obtain. Such a formal model of the domain can furthermore enable automated reasoning for maintenance discovery and failure causes detection by integrating a large amount of background contextual information scattering in different resources. In this paper we provide the rationale of the Avionics Maintenance ontology i.e. how we built it through expert knowledge and alignment of different sources and an ontology alignment evaluation tool.