Creating a diagnostic engineering tool set

The development of supportability techniques and tools which keep pace with mission equipment technology is essential to minimize long term maintenance costs. The DoD's solution is the use of an integrated diagnostic (ID) process. An integral part of MDA's plan to implement ID is the use of automated tools to effectively assess diagnostic capabilities during the design process. The development and implementation of a procedure to effectively diagnose an item of mission equipment involves several analyses performed during various phases of the equipment development. A mixture of automated tools and manual methods are currently used to perform these analyses. The effort required to perform these diagnostic analyses can be significantly reduced and the quality of the analyses can be significantly improved by developing an automated method of implementing those portions of the analysis which are currently performed manually. Additional improvements can be realized by integrating those automated tools, utilized separately to perform each analysis, into a unified tool set operating on a common set of design data.<>