A Software Environment for Test Program Development and Validation

The goal of the proposed effort is to develop a software environment that performs model-based reasoning to generate an efficient and validated test program set (TPS). To this end, we propose to leverage our integrated diagnostic environment, centered around Testability Engineering and Maintenance System (TEAMS), for the creation of multisignal models and the generation of optimized diagnostic strategies, and enhance it by adding the following modules: (1) A graphical environment to create and maintain test objects that will promote re-use of test procedures across UUTs; (2) a simulation environment for automatic fault insertion and validation of the diagnostic strategy; and (3) a code generator to encode the diagnostic strategy directly in ATLAS. In case of misdiagnosis or design changes, only the model needs to be updated, and a new optimized tree and the revised TPS will be generated using mostly existing test objects. The resulting strategy will produce accurate, modular, reusable TPS that is easy to update and validate. Moreover, our experience at Sikorsky Aircraft and in the JTIDS project indicates that TEAMS generated diagnostic strategy typically requires only a third of the tests required by a manually generated TPS, resulting in significant savings in test development and validation costs.