Abstract

Generally, maintenance tasks need various knowledge, which includes empirical knowledge of experienced experts. This led our interest to inheritance of maintenance expertise. We thought any powerful methodology for the purpose must be discussed, and it will never be achieved without dealing with background knowledge of maintenance. From this viewpoint, we analyzed educational documents about maintenance in order to derive representation of such background knowledge. This discussion lead to “maintenance ontology”, and a particular representation constructed with three knowledges; knowledge about design process, knowledge about trouble occurrence, and free style document. The free style document is prepared as additional description of the other two knowledges, and besides description of empirical knowledge. The empirical knowledge would be described in context of design and trouble occurrence. We have developed a prototype CAI system and asked maintenance experts to evaluate it. The result of the evaluation was totally satisfactory, and so we concluded the proposed methodology significant.