Airbus Commercial and Maana have announced Airbus Cognitive Platform ("AIRKOG") that is capable of answering any domain-specific question.

Created by Airbus Commercial and powered by Maana, AIRKOG encodes the subject matter expertise of people, orchestrates a range of tools, and uses terabytes of data from multiple sources for the development and deployment of intelligent applications to answer critical technical questions on A320, A330 and A350 aircraft models.

"As a transformational platform, AIRKOG is helping us to drive improvements at Airbus Commercial," says Florent Bouix, AIRKOG Platform Manager for Big Data products service line at Airbus. "We provide solutions to thousands of employees with an increasing number of intelligent applications in engineering, procurement, logistics, quality, program management, as well as rapid analysis for plant and final assembly line improvements."

Using AIRKOG platform capabilities, Airbus consolidates data from tens of different systems; identifies and establishes a vast number of relations and correlations, implement computations and run analysis across multiple operational domains; all on a single platform.

"Thanks to AIRKOG, we have achieved multi-million Euro cost savings per year at various areas," Bouix states: "For example:

Managing complex process related to new parts introduction due to aircraft changes for new Head of Version (involving engineering, sourcing, ordering, and manufacturing); Supporting the margin reviews or costs reduction of some aircraft options; and mastering electrical harnesses configuration changes and reallocation by providing multivariate analysis to avoid scrapping in a complex manufacturing organization with multiple plants."

AIRKOG started in 2017 as a proof of concept for use of knowledge graph technology to reduce time spent by Airbus engineers and technicians searching for information. AIRKOG moved to pilot phase in 2018, and into production in 2019. After two years running in production at scale, Airbus Commercial and Maana extended their partnership for another three years for 2021-2023.

"AIRKOG is an intelligent platform, like its consumer-facing cousins Siri and Alexa," says Babur Ozden, Founder and CEO of Maana. "However, it answers far more difficult questions regarding many complex aspects of making, maintaining, and repairing aircraft."

"Thanks to AIRKOG platform and the computational knowledge graph at its core, we reduced costs by 20% – 30% and lead-time for analysis by 30% – 75% on our digitalisation platform," says Marc Monties, WideBody digitalisation plateau leader at Airbus.