Co-Configuration of Products and On-Line Service Manuals

As products are growing more complex, so is their documentation. With an increasing number of product options, the diversity in service and maintenance procedures grows accordingly. Different variants of a model line consist of different components and thus require different service procedures. SIEMENS Medical Solutions has thus decided, instead of having one common on-line service handbook for all its Magnetic Resonance Tomographs, to fragment the on-line documentation into small (help) packages, out of which a suitable subset is selected for each individual product instance. Selection of help packages is controlled by XML terms encoding Boolean choice conditions. To assure that the set of available help packages is sufficient for all valid product instances, we developed a tool called HelpChecker that uses SATand BDD-based methods to guarantee completeness of the on-line documentation and to support authors in finding residual gaps.