Digitalization of the maintenance process for the needs of the CAO organization

Abstract

Digitalization and automation are unstoppable processes that are linked to the present and have a significant impact on the efficiency of the work carried out in aviation or any other industry. The aim of this article is to create a digital maintenance environment for the needs of the Combined Airworthiness organisation (CAO), which is part of the Air Training and Education Centre of the University of Žilina. Such software would unify and facilitate the overall maintenance process performed by the CAO. In this article we have evaluate the requirements of the CAO organisation and the legislation in force. During the development process, we communicated extensively with both the experts and the maintenance staff for whom we were developing the program. Then, based on what we learned, we created a basic structure of the required software and hardware needed to create a digital maintenance environment and started building it. We have then described all the processes involved in the program and its components to the extent that this article can partially serve as a guide for the creation of such a program. Methods of drawing on software and hardware resources have been purposely limited in the article to free products or to those, that are commonly available in price. The work has resulted in functional software that contains all the necessary documents, job cards and forms to carry out maintenance and substantially replaces the more paper-intensive form of data entry and storage.