US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 1

Evaluation and Assessment of DoD 

Maintenance Records Using Natural 

Language Processing

Presentation by Maria Seale, PhD

Computer Scientist
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 2

Motivation

Enormous Problem Space

The OIB sustains approximately 

• 339,290 vehicles,

• 280 combatant ships and 

submarines, and over 

• 15,340 aircraft and supporting 

critical safety items. 

Roughly $92 billion of DoD’s total 

FY2019 $687.8 billion expenditure 

was applied to maintenance 

activities and services.” 

- FY20 Industrial 

Capabilities Report to Congress

O&S costs account for ~ 75% of DoD platform lifecycle costs
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 3

Motivation

Reliability ✧ Availability ✧ Maintainability

Vehicles exposed to harsh and hostile environments

Undiscovered fleet-wide trends can compromise safety

Unscheduled maintenance decreases availability

Field maintenance is difficult or unsafe

Goal: Improve RAM metrics

Challenges:
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 4

Maintenance Philosophies

Scheduled Maintenance

• Time-based

• Actual condition not considered

• Improve reliability and 

availability

• Can be less costly

Condition Based Maintenance

• Rely on sensors and other 

indicators to determine best 

maintenance time

• Not possible to monitor all 

components

• Potentially greater failure risk 

based on thresholds/algorithms

Optimize by including predictions on 

maintenance needed before next visit

Mining text data can 

improve maintenance 

across philosophies 

Where does text processing fit?
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 5

Maintenance Text Processing

Record Categorization for improved RAM

RAM Metrics

Maintenance Logs ~ 10% of records are manually labeled

~ 90% of data are not labeled

Supervised Learning

Fleet-wide metrics are 

needed to assess 

trends and issues

100% labeled data
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 6

Maintenance Text Processing

Record Categorization for improved RAM

Maintenance Type

Maintenance Cause

Component Label

Maintenance 

Cause

Maintenance 

Type

Component

Predicting labels individually revealed 

dependencies

Learning Using 

Privileged Information 

(LUPI) model

Over 1200 

unique labels

NLP and ML methods produced 93% 

accuracy across all three labels
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 7

Maintenance Text Processing

Sensor Data Correlation for Predictive Maintenance

How can we use available data to enable predictive maintenance?

Logbook data describes 

the problem that 

occurred in the past

Sensor data 

indicates a problem 

as it occurs in the 

present

Together, they can 

inform predictive 

maintenance models 

for the future
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 8

Maintenance Text Processing

Sensor Data Correlation for Predictive Maintenance

How can we use available data to enable predictive maintenance?

Logbook data describes 

the problem that 

occurred in the past

Sensor data 

indicates a problem 

as it occurs in the 

present

Together, they can 

inform predictive 

maintenance models 

for the future
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 9

Maintenance Text Processing

Impact Discovery

How can we leverage collected data for new purposes?

• Data have been collected on some platforms for decades

• Understand organizational goals and priorities - RAM

• Goal-centered data exploration starting with text

• Categorization

• Impact

• Data linkage

Mechanical Electrical
US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS • ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER • MBE SUMMIT 2021 • UNCLASSIFIED/DISTRIBUTION A • 10

Maria.A.Seale@erdc.dren.mil

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Thank you!