| The aircraft maintenance domain is a complex system having many interrelated human and machine subsystems. Inspection is a critical step in the overall maintenance process and can be either: Visual Inspection (VI) and Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI). According to a 1993 study, 80 percent of the airline accidents are attributed to human errors, while maintenance and inspection errors contribute to 15 percent of these. As human inspectors are a critical part of this inspection system, there is a need to identify techniques or methods that would improve the overall efficiency of this system.; It was found that scanning techniques affected both accuracy as well as speed for this particular inspection task. When accuracy (number of hits recorded) was the performance metric, manual scanning technique was the best as the hit rate was the highest. On the other hand, when speed (average analysis time per condition) was the performance metric, discontinuous scanning technique appeared to be the best as the analysis time taken was the least. The varying display generation rates did not affect the performance on this particular task. Also, accuracy was not affected by the different primary target probabilities. However, the mean search time reduced in the lower primary target probability condition. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
