Pointer-an Intelligent Maintenance Aid

After eight years of development and application, the ARINC Research Corporation System Testability and Maintenance Program (STAMP@) has been expanded to provide a portable, intelligent, interactive diagnostic tool-the portable interactive troubleshooter (POINTER). POINTER is an artificially intelligent, portable maintenance aid that utilizes the STAMP system model, test choice, and inference algorithms to provide a dynamically tailored fault-isolation process. With POINTER, the user may declare test results, hypothesize failures, and override or delay the specified test, and have POINTER select another test to perform. During fault isolation, the user receives the fault identification and may request repair procedures, isolation recap with verification procedures, or a variety of analyses for multiple failures. In addition to the ability to dynamically tailor the faultisolation session to the current situation, the user has access to a complete explanation facility. Finally, POINTER logs the entire analysis and can modify its search strategy by incorporating, through a learning algorithm, the actual test times and failure rates experienced.