MTA -a tool for automated task analysis and lifecycle support

Efficient and cost effective maintenance is a key to success in the aircraft engine business today. Airlines are making money when their aircraft are in the air and are in turn losing money when engines are in the shop. For large-scale systems such as an aircraft engine, system maintenance and support usually ranges from 60 to 75% of overall life cycle costs. It is therefore imperative that products be designed with efficient and cost effective maintenance and support in mind. Maintainability is a product characteristic describing how efficient and cost effective the support of a complex system will be. One of the biggest challenges today is in injecting this discipline into the product development cycle at a time when it can actually make a difference in the overall support and maintenance cost of the system. In this paper, we present MTA, our tool for automated maintenance task analysis, and MTA's role within the product data lifecycle.