Textual meta-analysis of maintenance management's knowledge assets

Maintenance management activities include identifying, creating and storing knowledge assets. The knowledge assets are either documented/codified or undocumented/non-codified. In order to utilise the accumulated knowledge assets in the operational, tactical and strategic layers, documented knowledge should be meta-analysed. Meta-analysis is to discover the strength of the relationship between certain variables by means of automatic or semi-automatic algorithms. Meta-analysis has three methods: (1) statistical; (2) mathematical; and (3) textual. In this paper, the textual meta-analysis of maintenance management's knowledge assets is examined. In particular, the objective is to develop a virtual application for finding the relationship between three classes of text entities such as machines, practitioners and maintenance operations by means of technical implementation of the concept for the imitation of the mental ability of word association (CIMAWA). In addition, the virtual application is designed to be integrated as an add-on in the framework of computerised maintenance management information system (CMMIS).