Toward Building a Technical Engineering Smart Search

Documentation is an integral part of any product development. Product and documentation should co-evolve; whenever the product is changed the documentation should be updated and vice versa. Yet, oftentimes, multiple documentation and product versions may exist; between and within the documentation of the product, relations and dependencies may or may not be explicit, documented, trustworthy or consistent. For example, dependencies may not be explicitly stated (or different terms may be used for the same concepts), obscure jargon and technical abbreviations may be used inconsistently. In a regulated domain such as aerospace, a lack of consistency and–or coherence in the documentation of a product is a critical issue. Airborne software certification requires documentation to be unambiguous, precise and complete. Documentation and documentation relations are vital to ensure and prove dependability.
The high-level and long-term goal of this research is to support engineers in information gathering and fruition via semi-automatic document analytics (i) to promote information consistency; (ii) to extract and build trustworthy document (and document parts) relations (including traceability relations) and models; and (iii) to foster an effective information access and use.

Faculty Supervisor:

Foutse Khomh;Giuliano Antoniol

Student:

Emilio Rivera

Partner:

Bombardier Aerospace

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Aerospace and defense

University:

École Polytechnique de Montréal