A Compliance-Preserving Retrieval System for Aircraft MRO Task Search
This addresses a documented efficiency bottleneck in multilingual aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) operations by enabling faster, accurate task searches while preserving strict regulatory compliance, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of Aircraft Maintenance Technicians spending up to 30% of work time searching manuals by developing a compliance-preserving retrieval system that integrates with certified legacy viewers, achieving a 95% reduction in lookup time from 6-15 minutes to 18 seconds per task and a 90.9% top-10 success rate in bilingual studies.
Aircraft Maintenance Technicians (AMTs) spend up to 30% of work time searching manuals, a documented efficiency bottleneck in MRO operations where every procedure must be traceable to certified sources. We present a compliance-preserving retrieval system that adapts LLM reranking and semantic search to aviation MRO environments by operating alongside, rather than replacing, certified legacy viewers. The system constructs revision-robust embeddings from ATA chapter hierarchies and uses vision-language parsing to structure certified content, allowing technicians to preview ranked tasks and access verified procedures in existing viewers. Evaluation on 49k synthetic queries achieves >90% retrieval accuracy, while bilingual controlled studies with 10 licensed AMTs demonstrate 90.9% top-10 success rate and 95% reduction in lookup time, from 6-15 minutes to 18 seconds per task. These gains provide concrete evidence that semantic retrieval can operate within strict regulatory constraints and meaningfully reduce operational workload in real-world multilingual MRO workflows.