Benefits of intelligent support systems (weapons maintenance)

The benefits derived from the intelligent maintenance aid (IMA) project at Emerson Electric Co. are documented by comparing this expert system with traditional test systems. The expert system architecture, methods used for comparison with traditional test systems, and the benefits derived from the expert system implementation are explained. The structure of an artificial intelligence system allows coverage of more failure situations than traditional test programs. This is due to the fact that the rules and knowledge are separate from the inferencing mechanism, allowing the expert system to be adaptive to the current failure situation. Savings of 28% in test program development cost, approximately 47% savings in MTTR (mean time to repair), and 32% reduction in RTOK (retest-okay) rate were calculated using data on the current capabilities of the IMA system.<
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