Automatic Generation of Layered Illustrated Parts Drawings for Advanced Technical Data Systems

Abstract

Illustrated Parts drawings are used extensively in the maintenance and repair of commercial and military aircraft. The Boeing Company has hundreds of thousands of illustrated parts drawings that must be transformed into richer, more intelligent formats for use in advanced technical data systems. Because manually re-authoring the drawings is prohibitively expensive, our solution is to provide a batch-processing system that automatically transforms raster illustrated parts drawings into intelligent, interactive, layered vector graphic files.

A typical aircraft may have thousands of illustrated parts drawings that identify hierarchies of assemblies and parts. These assemblies and parts are labeled to show how they fit together. Reference labels and arrows are used to identify specific parts. Supporting parts information is stored in a database and is indexed by the reference labels on the drawings. There are cross-references among the different detail pictures, within a single raster file and across different raster files.

Patent Pending, U.S. Application No. 10/318,921. Dec 13, 2002.