APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N192-065

Description

The growing complexities of Naval air platforms have adversely affected maintenance operations. Particularly, the Navy 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. To address these gaps, Aptima and its partners, Apex Analytics Group and ASEC, propose to develop the Collaborative Heuristic-based Engineering Workbench with a Behavior-Aware Classifier for Cognitive Assistance (CHEWBACCA), a proactive and adaptive cognitive assistant for maintenance crews of air platforms. CHEWBACCA will enable (1) multimodal and virtual representations of contextually-relevant technical data based on mission/task and operator, (2) multi-input data structuring and fusion for the purpose of conducting predictive maintenance, and (3) asynchronous and distributed collaboration between crew members. CHEWBACCA 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; engineers and data authors will understand what is needed through visualization of data and collaborative work between crewmembers. Ultimately, CHEWBACCA acts as a companion technology to improve maintenance outcomes, reduce downtime of air platforms, and lower costs.