Open Architecture Tools to Describe Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) Capabilities

For years the DoD ATE community has been trying to build an open architecture environment that would support avionic testing across and within services. Little progress has been made in this area due to lack of applicable standards and a common vocabulary that could communicate test requirements required by the various users. This has led to non-standard designs in the ATEs and their associated tools. The proposal describes a method and approach that utilizes an appropriate set of existing IEEE standards designed to address this problem. However, these standards have not been utilized effectively based on the lack of guidelines for the selection of optional elements necessary to support the broad scope of use cases and common vocabulary of test parameters. The approach taken is to effectively utilize the modeling capability of the standard to build a library of signal models. A testing taxonomy structure of test categories and parameters will be used to identify these parameters. They will address both the UUT and ATE capabilities making the identification and utilization of a library of signal models that will allow for the development of a management tool that will be capable of supporting model development, TPS operation and resource interfacing.