Intelligent aircraft maintenance support system using genetic algorithms and case-based reasoning

The maintenance of aircraft components is crucial for avoiding aircraft accidents and aviation fatalities. To provide reliable and effective maintenance support, it is important for the airline companies to utilise previous repair experience with the aid of advanced decision support technology. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a machine learning method that adapts previous similar cases to solve current problems. To effectively retrieve similar aircraft maintenance cases, this research proposes using a CBR system to aid electronic ballast fault diagnosis of Boeing 747-400 airplanes. By employing genetic algorithms (GA) to enhance dynamic weighting and the design of non-similarity functions, the proposed CBR system is able to achieve superior learning performance as compared to those with either equal/varied weights or linear similarity functions.