Hardware emulation and test at the flightline

Confirming mission readiness is the most critical function flightline testers perform. Ideally, pre-night mission readiness assessments would exercise and verify every critical function of the weapon system that could be called upon in battle. No existing flightline test system can provide this level of readiness assessment. So what is wrong with today's testers? First, it is not practical to perform operational end-to-end testing of major subsystems with conventional testers. Second, many testers cannot readily make use of failure data that is available from on-board vehicle health monitoring systems or current testers use hardware intensive architectures-architectures that drive performance versus size, weight, and total ownership cost tradeoffs. How can we change this? Integrating portable maintenance aids (PMAs) and maintenance information systems into the test repertoire can help significantly; however, these solutions do little to augment the information available for system test and diagnosis. Adding conventional test instrumentation under PMA control would provide the additional information we seek, but as cited above, hardware intensive solutions is one of the problems with today's flightline testers. Emulating test instrumentation using virtual instruments (VI) specifically addresses the problems and limitations associated with hardware intensive test systems. This paper will describe the VI concept and Honeywell's two embodiments of VI, and will discuss VI's applicability to flightline test and the next generation automatic test systems.