Monitoring and Control of Hybrid Test Systems 2017-01-2119

Hybrid test systems are gaining more and more significance in the aerospace industry. At the heart of these systems is a standardized communication infrastructure. There are many challenges when designing the communication infrastructure. For example, it requires very specific knowledge to boot a hybrid system, manage its configuration process, and start and stop the execution of applications, such as simulations, panels or recorders. Likewise, when testers use a heterogeneous test environment, they cannot commit themselves too much to every single test means and its special characteristics. Nevertheless, testers must always be able to monitor and control every test system. This means, they must be able to determine the current overall system status and the current status of its components and parts. Examples for this are hardware components, such as real-time processors and I/O boards, as well as software applications, such as real-time simulations models on the test system. Based on this, the user needs to be able to efficiently control the test bench and appropriately react to error situations. For the hybrid test system, this means that each of its modules must follow a common concept for status monitoring and control. Naturally, this is not the case as every supplier has their own specific methods and concepts for these tasks. The aim of this paper is to present concepts for hybrid test benches incorporating systems from different suppliers. These concepts are based on the idea of a communication infrastructure that supplies the standardized transport mechanism required for interoperability. As a first step, the requirements for cross-vendor status monitoring and control are analyzed with a particular emphasis on developing a common basis. Subsequently, a basic concept is presented for both status monitoring and control. The goal is to find mechanisms that can be used to establish a standard.