Wireless Devices Usage with Adaptive Interfaces in the Context of Aeronautical Maintenance Processes to Reduce the Incidence of the Human Error and Increase Safety 2007-01-3832

This work falls in the context of aeronautical maintenance processes. The purpose is to increase the effectiveness and the efficiency of the operations carried out during the activities in the processes mentioned above, as well as the reduction of the incidence of the human error in the development of these activities, with consequent implicit increase of the safety of the aircrafts. Human error has been documented as a primary contributor to more than 70 percent of commercial airplane hull-loss accidents. While typically associated with flight operations, human error has also recently become a major concern in maintenance practices and air traffic management. We have tried to obtain an increment of the safety formalizing the information exchange process avoiding ambiguous, inaccurate or incomplete data that can indirectly encourage the deviation of the personnel from established procedures. This paper explores the possibilities of wireless devices usage in these productive contexts and proposes an architecture that aims at improving the man machine interface in accordance with both the operator profile and the device profile. The “operator profile” contains information about the set of functions that the user can execute by means of the device. The “device profile” collects information about wireless device, like: screen dimensions, utilized bandwidth, processing capabilities, keyboard and mouse type, protocols used, etc. This profile contains also the preferences of the device user. Our approach tends to isolate the contents of a specific application and, consequently, adapts the user interface according to the profiles without the necessity to manage different “copies” of the same application. It allows the differentiating, also in a vast way, of the user interface between one device and another one while preserving, when possible, the same contents. It is possible, moreover, to use a new device, with a new profile, with a limited, or null, number of precise limited modifications, outside of the executable code of the application. The W3C standard used in order to formalize the profiles is CC/PP. The proposed architecture has been represented with a set of UML views