AMMP: an Automated Maintenance Manual Production system

Generating maintenance documentation is traditionally a manual process. This is true for most industries, although products and customer documentation requirements are frequently revised. The result is frequent documentation revision and significant labor costs. This paper describes a system to automate the generation of maintenance documentation for mechanical assemblies, the Automated Maintenance Manual Production (AMMP) system. Product and customer requirement revisions are accessed from a central database. For a given maintenance task, a spatial planner module derives a sequence of operations to carry out the task based on the product CAD definition. A presentation manager module converts this sequence into formatted text and illustrations