VICTORY: A New Approach to Automated Vehicle Testing

Military ground vehicles are complex systems of systems involving Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance/Electronic Warfare (C4ISR/EW) and vehicular platform components, with an ever-increasing demand for more capability, increased survivability and expedient acquisition timelines. A current effort within the U.S. Army is the Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/EW Interoperability (VICTORY) initiative. VICTORY provides standard, on-the-wire network interfaces for C4ISR/EW and platform systems and sensors. VICTORY provides the ability to network platform equipment and enables automated testing and logistics data gathering, thereby offering key pieces of vehicle data to applications on the vehicle. The development of and adherence to open, well-defined, and accepted standards on military vehicles is key to an automated testing capability. By implementing open systems architectures (OSAs) as the interoperability layer upon which systems and sensors are connected, generalized test and evaluation methodologies can be developed and deployed. Leveraging modular, open system architectures and standard specifications like VICTORY for automated vehicle testing may provide opportunities for reduced system interconnect complexity, increased testing capabilities, and possibility for more meaningful, tightly coupled, data-rich test results. OSAs provide the framework for building generalized test sets, offering the opportunity to share a standard in-vehicle network environment upon which different applications can tailor specific test solutions.