Facilitating design learning through faceted classification of in-service information

The maintenance and service records collected and maintained by engineering companies are a useful resource for the ongoing support of products. Such records are typically semi-structured and contain key information such as a description of the issue and the product affected. It is suggested that further value can be realised from the collection of these records for indicating recurrent and systemic issues which may not have been apparent previously. This paper presents a faceted classification approach to organise the information collection that might enhance retrieval and also facilitate learning from in-service experiences. The faceted classification may help to expedite responses to urgent in-service issues as well as to allow for patterns and trends in the records to be analysed, either automatically using suitable data mining algorithms or by manually browsing the classification tree. The paper describes the application of the approach to aerospace in-service records, where the potential for knowledge discovery is demonstrated.