AIRCRAFT DESIGN FOR MAINTAINABILITY

Maintainability of aircraft can be enhanced during design by attending to the capacities and limitations of the people who are expected to maintain the aircraft. One tool for examining the interaction of maintenance personnel and aircraft structure or equipment is a computer-generated human model. Human models can be merged with computer-aided-design (CAD) electronic drawings of aircraft structure to simulate segments of maintenance tasks. Predictions of maintainers' performance can then be based on the simulations. The process of creating simulations and extracting information from them requires the definition of a maintenance task and maintainer population, identification of critical task segments, preparation of a structure file and merging the human model, and interpreting the resulting simulation. Whereas rules and constraints help to guide selection, sizing, and merging of a human model, inference based on knowledge of human performance is important for extraction of information from a simulation.