Towards Building Ontology-Based Applications for Integrating Heterogeneous Aircraft Maintenance Records

Over the past decade, advancement in computing and information technology has led to digitization of aircraft operations and maintenance standards and processes. Aircraft maintenance records are increasingly being stored in maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO) information systems. However, harmonisation and interoperability between heterogenous MRO systems has emerged as a key challenge in integrating maintenance records over the lifespan of an aircraft. This adds to the time and cost to maintain aircraft continuous airworthiness, configuration management and valuation. The role of ontologies for knowledge management provides an effective means of using formal semantics for data integration and improved knowledge representation of a domain. In this paper, we examine the application of ontologies for integrating heterogenous aircraft maintenance records. We investigate the key challenges of developing ontology-based applications in practice and reflected on the research efforts needed to counter the challenges. We described 3 research directions and proposed an integrated approach - Agile Development for Ontology-Based Applications (ADOBA) by taking a fine-grained look at the gap between ontological and software engineering methodologies. The proposed approach is part of a research work aimed at creating and validating an ontology model for aircraft through-life support and developing prototypical demonstration as part of the Cranfield Digital Aviation initiative.