A scalable solution for integrating illustrated parts drawings into a Class IV Interactive Electronic Technical Manual

Abstract

This paper discusses a scalable solution for integrating legacy illustrated parts drawings into a Class IV Interactive Electronic Technical Manual (IETM) (1995). An IETM is an interactive electronic version of a system's technical manuals such as for a commercial airplane or a military helicopter. It contains the information a technician needs to do her job including troubleshooting, vehicle maintenance and repair procedures. A Class IV IETM is an IETM that is authored and managed directly via a database. The end-user system optimizes viewing and navigation, minimizing the need for users to browse and search through large volumes of data. The Boeing Company has hundreds of thousands of illustrated parts drawings for both commercial and military vehicles. As Boeing migrates to Class IV IETM systems, it is necessary to incorporate existing illustrated parts drawings into the new systems. Manually re-authoring the drawings to bring them up to the level of a Class IV IETM is prohibitively expensive. Our solution is to provide a batch-processing system that performs the required modifications to the raster images and automatically updates the IETM database.