A virtual approach to maintenance manual development

One of the difficulties in conducting a thorough maintainability analysis is the inability to rehearse maintenance on the system prior to production. Once a design is complete and the maintenance manuals are produced, it is often too late to make significant changes to the design for the ease of maintenance. This paper describes a concurrent engineering approach to generate maintenance instructions from Computer Aided Design (CAD) models and to validate the instructions in a haptics-enabled virtual environment. This technology will significantly streamline the maintenance manual development process by extracting maintenance information directly from the design. The immersive virtual environment will afford the analyst an early look at the maintenance data in action, providing a platform for identifying maintenance related design and documentation flaws. This approach to maintenance manual development will enable design and documentation to be developed concurrently.