Agent aided aircraft maintenance

Aircraft maintenance is performed by mechanics who are required, by regulation, to consult expert engineers for repair instructions and approval. In addition to their own experience, these engineers rely on external information sources, which are often inadequately indexed and geographically dispersed. The timely retrieval of this distributed information is vital to the engineers' ability to recommend repair procedures in response to the mechanics' requests. This problem domain is well suited for a multi-agent system: it consists of distributed multi-modal information which is needed by multiple users with diverse preferences. In this paper, we describe an implementation of such a system, using the RETSINA multi-agent architecture. Such an implementation reinforces the importance of multi-agent systems, and in particular the usefulness of the RETSINA infrastructure as a basis for the construction of such systems.