Properly managed and modelled virtual maintenance trainers (VMTs) can recreate any complex system, be it a helicopter, tank or ship, to any level of detail. They can provide a truly virtual free-play environment that allows the student to view and interact with the system in any way they want, and be confident that the consequences of their actions replicate precisely any interactions with the real equipment.
The real value of virtual maintenance trainers comes when an instructor has the ability to inject faults, the effects of which propagate through the equipment and result in symptoms which can be observed and then diagnosed by the student. This enables students to learn maintenance tasks such as fault isolation/detection, remove/replace procedures, operational/functional check, and maintenance task rehearsals.
This learning experience can be further enhanced by students’ ability to interface real or modelled equipment, such as test sets and prognostic systems, directly with the virtual maintenance trainer. This furthers the learning experience by allowing the maintenance technicians to learn how to operate the tools that they will go on to use in the operational role.
The main benefits of virtual maintenance trainers over using real equipment can be summarised as:
- Multi-Configuration Scenarios – The majority of new military equipment now requires simultaneous training on a range of variants. An example of this is the multi-national NH-90 medium transport and utility helicopter. The aircraft has been developed to support a variety of operational roles and is being modified for the specific training requirements of at least 10 different countries. Using a virtual maintenance trainer, the instructor is able to quickly reconfigure the training simulation to any number of concurrent operational builds.
- Increased student throughput – The system is always available to the student. There is no requirement for the real system to be available, enabling maintenance procedures to be replicated many times on many single ‘virtual’ systems.
- Lower costs – providing real equipment requires a higher initial cost and incurs a high budget to support the in-service life span in terms of spares and repairs to frequently used equipment.
- Safe training environment – students can not damage the equipment and can learn a job in potentially harmful working environment without risk to themselves.
- Ability to inject more realistic faults – Instructors can inject faults with ease and then immediately reset the system for the next task. The faults include diagnostic procedures that would be hard to replicate on real equipment without causing it serious damage.
- Ability to aid instructor functionality – Instructors can monitor students as they undertake tasks; demonstrate particularly complex procedures for the students on their PC; record student performance and playback for debrief as well as evaluate and store student progress through an integrated learning management system.
- Team Training Tasks – Many maintenance training tasks require maintenance technicians to work in teams. The virtual maintenance system allows students on individual computers to interact with each other and simultaneously undertake a team training task.
This last bullet also highlights the first of the future challenges that Virtual Maintenance Trainers are able to support. Platforms such as EFA Typhoon and NH-90 have been developed to be in-service for at least the next two decades. They also represent significant international sales opportunities for their prime contractors. This means that, over the potential in-service life span of such systems, there will be a requirement to upgrade component systems as technology continues to advance. In addition, the international acquisition of these aircraft will demand that they are modified to reflect specifications of each country. Developed in the correct manner, virtual maintenance training systems can be easily reconfigured to support any component upgrade or system variant.
Other future challenges that virtual maintenance trainers are now looking to address include:
- Remote working- Rather than having a team of maintainers co-located together, it is likely that for certain equipment there will be a distributed workforce with maintainers working remotely.
- More reliable equipment- If a class of maintenance technicians are trained on a particular fault scenario, the chances are that perhaps only one of those technicians will encounter that fault in his career, and maybe after such a time period that he has forgotten all about it anyway (the problem of "skill-fade").
- On-board diagnostics- Equipment will provide full on-board diagnostic facilities that can automatically provide a maintainer with a LRU replacement task description in a significant number of cases. Within aviation, this information may even be available before the aircraft lands.
- Rapid Reaction- In these days of rapid deployment it may be that the maintenance engineer will be expected to maintain very unfamiliar kit and have little or no time to get up-to-speed on the equipment before he is faced with performing a task with it.
- Volatile technical information- An aim, particularly within the military, is to reduce the time taken to update the maintenance procedures from the reporting of a problem. The maintainer will be dealing with more volatile information and may need assistance in keeping up to date.
- Higher staff turnover- We may expect a higher turnover of maintenance technicians, as we see more mobility in careers. Today we see many fewer situations where people have a "job for life" and system knowledge is quickly drained from an organisation.
The economic and operational benefits that virtual maintenance trainers can deliver are well proven. However, it’s the extent to which these maintenance training systems are now deployed that will determine the level of improved performance in front line equipment.
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