Evidence-based Bayesian networks approach to airplane maintenance

A system that facilitates airplane maintenance provides decision support for finding the root-cause of a failure from observed symptoms and findings. Such system provides diagnostic advice listing the most probable causes and recommending possible remedial actions. Furthermore, its goal is to reduce the number of delays and cancellations and unnecessary parts removal, which add significant costs to airplane maintenance operations. A Bayesian belief network, model-based approach is presently being used for building such diagnostic models. The paper describes the pertinent issues in using such models.