STE and calibration.....the IPT approach

Times have changed: the threat today is not what it was 10 or even 5 years ago. Today the Navy has the same number of surface combatants as it did in the 1930's. Defense spending is down worldwide; yet the U.S. still represents 33% of worldwide defense spending, in contrast to Russia's now 7% representation. This has driven us to greatly extended life cycles for our systems and drives us to greatly reduce development times. There are many traps to schedule reduction; one of them is in the area of special test equipment (STE). Today we no longer buy black boxes or standalone weapons, but rather we buy integrated weapons system. This provides a great challenge to the STE community and hence the metrology community as well. The interactions between subsystems (and hence test equipment as well) produce conditions of tolerance stack up which can produce out of spec test results from subassemblies that are within spec. This paper discusses some of the problems we have seen with regard to STE and potential calibration problems. We will then discuss a potential model and solution to reduce these problems.