The Simplified TPS Encoding Process

The process of TPS development is an increasingly complicated endeavor. As units under test become more and more complex, a greater investment of time for analysis and simulation is required than ever before. Additionally, traditional TPS software development environments are monolithic, necessitating costly training time for the engineer to learn the environment as well as forcing tedious and difficult development interfaces on the engineer. The simplified TPS encoding process (STEP), developed by the 76 SMXG at Tinker AFB, is a novel process for the development of TPSs that removes dependency on specific programming languages from the TPS engineer. STEP reduces the up-front time required to train new engineers and provides the TPS engineer with an easy-to-use development environment that can be modularly extended to work with any programming language or hardware interface. In addition, STEP uses plain text files to contain program code and store data results. The ease-of-use, modularity, and plain text source code provided by STEP result in the TPS engineer spending more time analyzing the unit under test instead of spending that time struggling to develop in a particular programming language.