Advanced maintenance using causal networks

A new approach to designing an advanced maintenance system that provides important capabilities both for system design and for onboard diagnostics. The maintenance system provides a graphical user interface that has been tailored for avionics and is designed for ease of use by engineers. The human-computer interface (HCI) is connected to the other system software components using common object request broker architecture (CORBA) middleware. The onboard diagnostics system can be compiled automatically from the models created by the engineers through the user interface. Together these features constitute a maintenance system that significantly advances the state-of-the-art.