Bridging the gap between ATLAS and C: an open-systems approach to TPS re-host

In these days of declining Department of Defense (DoD) budgets and the downsizing of the military, much of the focus has shifted away from large development programs for new platforms and equipment. Rather, upgrades to existing equipment, to modernize it and to replace obsolete components has become a major focus. Additionally, recent efforts of the DoD have been initiated to define or adopt standards that provide a common, open systems approach for all branches of the military. As part of this initiative the use of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) products throughout the DoD has begun to play a major role in defense-related automated test system (ATS) industry. The commercial test community has also responded to the needs of the military by creating instruments and software products which encompass the needs of the military for standardization, interchangeability and reliability, and which also embrace the future needs of the DoD. The impact of this evolution is becoming apparent in the ATS community, including the Test Program Set (TPS) community. The VME Extensions for instrumentation (VXI) Plug and Play standard for instrumentation drivers is one such example of this trend and has become standard on an increasingly larger percentage of DoD test. Along with this change, a trend toward commercial development environments and run-time systems has also emerged. National Instruments/sup TM/ LabVIEW(R) and LabWindows(R)/CVI are two of these environments which are increasingly utilized In military ATS platforms as well. The adoption of these standards has brought others to the forefront. Legacy, signal-based environments such as the IEEE's Abbreviated Test Language for All Systems (ATLAS) do not correlate with the instrument based focus the COTS tools provide. As the DOD focuses on commercialization and open architecture standards, the need to migrate existing TPSs from proprietary ATLAS-based platforms to an Open Systems platform becomes more critical. This paper will focus on a solution which leverages COTS software tools and emerging industry standards and technologies to implement object-oriented database tools which enable the conversion of an ATLAS TPS to an ANSI C environment.