The maintenance of complex technical systems is associated with performance of diagnostic works of electronic equipment in the recovery process. When performing operations on diagnostics of electronic equipment, the means of information support for the personnel play an important role. One of the main information resources staff is the set of operational documents, containing the necessary technical information. This circumstance determines the loss of time in the diagnostics of electronic equipment, which make operations connected with extracting and providing the staff with the required technical information.
The need to use various technical information in the diagnostics of electronic equipment determines the variety of methods and techniques to extract diagnostic information by staff from the set of operational documents, which should be implemented in information support systems.
The ways and means of extracting diagnostic information implemented in existing information support systems are based on the use of formal models in terms of graphs, matrices, charts, tables. These models do not allow us to represent the formal view of a large amount of diagnostic descriptive information contained in the operational documents. This significantly limits the capabilities of existing automation means of information support. As a consequence, there is a need of formation by staff in the process of diagnostics of electronic equipment of a great number of lookups required to retrieve technical information from databases that is associated with loss of time.
This paper proposes to form a more complete image information of electronic equipment from the point of view of information support staff to use another type of formal model – a descriptive model. This model is intended to describe the terms and concepts of the subject area of many of the facts and properties of electronic equipment based on operational documents, which can be used by staff in the diagnostics process.
As a formal basis for the construction of a descriptive model is proposed to use the mathematical apparatus of ontologies. The formation of descriptive models is done by merging all application ontologies, used to describe a component of electronic equipment in complex technical system, with a unified domain ontology of technical operation.
The use of descriptive model of electronic equipment in the architecture of information support systems provides an opportunity to the staff to use the terms of natural language when building queries to obtain the necessary diagnostic information. This helps to enhance the informative requests of staff, resulting in reducing the retrieval time of the information necessary in the process of diagnostics, through reduce the total number of generated queries.