The military benefits are more accurate, complete, and affordable technical manuals and associated documentation packaged for superior support of field maintenance. Civilian automotive and aviation industries, among others, develop similar documents and have corresponding requirements for automation support. Despite wider use of computers to support design and manufacturing, technical manuals are still created largely by hand. They require hardware mockups to develop and validate maintenance procedures.
Technical manuals are expensive to develop, validate, update, and distribute.
Opportunities are emerging to substantially reduce the cost and improve the accuracy and utility of these essential documents. There are two key technologies to be exploited. This allows physical prototypes to be replaced with virtual prototypes. Another key technology is simulation control making use of natural language processing. The idea is to take a written description of a maintenance procedure and automatically generate a simulation of the procedure using a computer-generated human figure model to represent the maintenance technician carrying out the task.