The growing complexities of Air Force air platforms have adversely affected maintenance operations. In particular, the Air Force is faced with mounting challenges in the interoperability of siloed data repositories: maintenance crews have limited, often delayed, and mostly incomplete access to adequate data to perform their tasks. Further exacerbating the problem is a shortage of experienced maintainers and a surplus of novice maintainers. Novice maintainers require the supervision, assistance, and training provided by experienced maintainers, further adding to the workload and stress of experienced maintainers. To address these gaps, Aptima and its partner, Qualtech Systems, Inc. (QSI), propose to integrate Reasoner for Operational Maintenance Updates Leveraging User Specifications (ROMULUS), a proactive and adaptive cognitive assistant for maintenance crews of air platforms. ROMULUS will (1) provide multimodal and virtual representations of contextually-relevant technical data based on mission/task and needs of the user, both task-specific and specific to the users expertise level; (2) enable multi-input data structuring and fusion for the purpose of conducting predictive maintenance based on a digital twin; and (3) allow asynchronous and distributed collaboration among crew members. ROMULUS will support a vision for a collaborative maintenance enterprise. Maintainers will have access to the information they need when they need it, in a form that is intuitive and engaging; all members of maintenance crews will understand what is needed through the consolidation and visualization of data from across disparate sources; and diagnosis and repair will be accelerated thanks to the more complete data provided by ROMULUSs data synthesis and QSIs proven, mature TEAMS® suite of software tools. Ultimately, ROMULUS will act as a companion technology to improve maintenance outcomes, reduce downtime of air platforms, and lower costs. ROMULUS will guarantee greater effectiveness, as novice maintainers will be supported by guidance at their level of expertise, and experienced maintainers will be supported by consolidated, simplified information from across sources presented in an intuitive interface. By improving maintenance outcomes, and reducing downtime and maintenance costs, ROMULUS has the potential to trigger massive savings for the Air Force, private fleet operators, and aircraft manufacturers.
