Digital Tools for Aircraft Maintenance: Prototyping Location-Aware AOI for Engine Assessment and Cable Routing Solutions

Aircraft maintenance plays a vital role in ensuring not only public safety but also aircraft availability and financial viability. However, carrying out such activities traditionally leaves gaps for processual optimizations with the potential of increasing the overall performance and satisfaction of operators and engineers who deal with these responsibilities. Currently, available technologies may enable the increment of quality in aircraft maintenance processes, namely, the ones based on xReality and deep learning. Therefore, this paper proposes two use-cases based on real aircraft maintenance context requirements: one employing augmented reality for cable routing, enabling cataloguing and also previewing the position and paths of cable systems inside the fuselage kit; and another making use of deep learning and virtual environments to aid in the activities related with engine baroscopic inspections, with position awareness capabilities. Results regarding a few functional and usability tests are also presented and discussed. In spite of their still incipient maturity, both these tools showed potential for being involved in the pipelines of aircraft maintenance in the future.