Beyond Maintenance Manual Multimodal RAG: Suggesting What Tool

Computer Science > Emerging Technologies [Submitted on 4 Sep 2026] Title:Beyond Maintenance Manual Multimodal RAG: Suggesting What Tool View PDFAbstract:Aircraft technicians are required to consult the maintenance manual (MM) for nearly every task, and locating the relevant procedure across hundreds of pages remains time-consuming. Multimodal retrieval augmented generation (MRAG) has been proposed to address this, allowing technicians to retrieve procedures, together with the accompanying figures, through natural-language queries. However, retrieval alone does not tell the technicians which tools the task requires. The MM identifies special tools only when the corresponding step is reached, and it does not state hand tool requirements at all; to select hand tools, technicians are required to find the hardware dimension from the illustrated parts catalog (IPC) and infer the right tool from it. We therefore propose MRAG-SWAT, an extension of the MRAG pipeline that returns the required hand tools and special tools alongside the retrieved procedure. The framework was implemented for the Lycoming IO-360-N1A engine and demonstrated on eight test queries. By presenting the correct tools together with the procedure, MRAG-SWAT may help reduce repeated trips to the tool crib, prevent damage to aircraft caused by improper tool selection, and thereby avoid additional maintenance tasks and support continued airworthiness. References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.