Self-improving ATE

It is shown that the Westinghouse Expert Diagnostic System (WEDS) Ada provides significant improvements over rule-based expert system shells for diagnostic applications, including a diagnostic-oriented development system and inference engine. By fully integrating the WEDS concepts within a standard Ada ATE (automatic test equipment) system, the expert system has gained more sophisticated operator interfaces, better interfaces with external software, and the ability to communicate with automatic test equipment. In turn, the ATE system has achieved expert system diagnostic capability. This effort provides test personnel using the ATE system with a practical tool to use as a repository for expertise and makes expert diagnostic knowledge available to all technicians in the field and in repair shops. The system also provides facilities for automatically acquiring statistical and historical diagnostic knowledge for both newly designed and previously fielded units under test. >

This paper will discuss the design and development of a visual inspection system and its integration into a proprietary Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) software environment. The initial concept of our inspection system is discussed, including a brief outline of why we chose to investigate a vision system, and our development plan. Following the initial purpose and plan, we will talk about the development of the system. This portion of the paper will include a brief description of the commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware and software used in the system, followed by an examination of the initial hardware setup and the development of the visual inspection process. After the inspection system has been examined, its integration into a proprietary ATE software environment is reviewed. Special emphasis will be placed on describing the challenge of adding a robust visual inspection capability to an ATE software environment requiring the flexibility to support multiple types of visual inspections using a common architecture. Finally we will review the lessons learned from this development project and briefly explore other potential applications of an integrated visual inspection system. These include: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and circuit board inspection.

As a result of a GAO (general accounting office) audit, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has designated the Navy as DoD's automatic test systems (ATS) ED, and a new joint ATS memorandum of agreement among the SAEs is in process. The DoD's policy for ATS acquisitions has remained fairly constant since its inception in 1994. However, emphasis has shifted to acquiring standard DoD ATS family testers as the preferred acquisition choice. The U.S. DoD has emphasized automatic testing since the early 1990s, when the DoD inspector general (IG) conducted a series of audits on the "Development and Acquisition of DoD Maintenance and Diagnostic Systems" in each of the armed services.

By embedding an expert system into portable automatic test equipment (ATE) the sophistication and capability of the testing system was increased while maintaining the compactness of the portable ATE. The results of this effort are presented, and include reductions in both the number and size of fault ambiguity sets, and the ability of the system to detect and isolate multiple faults. By combining information from built-in-test (BIT) results, user observations, and failure histories, the mean time to repair was reduced because utilization of this information permitted dynamic creation of an optimal test sequence. In addition, the recommendations presented have a greater amount of confidence associated with them because the intelligent maintenance aid (IMA) allows enhancement of existing ATE without major modifications to the hardware. >

The dial gauge is used widely in the production line at present. The dial gauge has many types and huge quantity. At present, testing this type of instrument is mainly used manual observation method. By man-made factors, the testing efficiency and accuracy is low. In order to improve the test efficiency and accuracy, it is required to use the automatic test methods for dial gauge. Although the control algorithm of control system in automatic test system is simple, the control accuracy is high demanding. So the design of control systems is essential. This paper takes the dial gauge automatic test method for the object and studied on the control system in the automatic test system. It presents the design principles, methods in fully automatic test system and studied on the design of control systems, mechanical drive parts and the software architecture. Finally, through experimental results verify the test system design is reasonable. Practical application results show that the system is feasible, and the motion control system is high precision and higher intellectualized. It also has good application prospect, especially for some special environment which is not suitable for testing by human eye, this system shows its superiority.

Recent changes in the state-of-the-art in software development and test instrumentation has provided the Department of Defense with opportunities to reduce the cost of its automatic test systems (automatic test equipment and the software and information required to drive that equipment). In order to guide and enhance this evolution, the three Services (USN, USAF, USA) have developed an automatic test system research and development program consisting of three broad areas; automatic test system functional interface convergence, next generation test environment, and automatic test system modernization methods. This program, when funded, will provide the technology necessary to transition to the open architecture test systems of the future. The balance of this paper covers the eleven identified tasks under these broad areas, and how they form a coordinated, integrated basis for an improved acquisition strategy. >

Faced with ever-increasing constraints of budget reductions and fight schedules, test engineers are looking for faster, more cost-efficient ways to get automatic test equipment (ATE) systems up and running. This case study examines a process known as Freedom/sup TM/ Series, developed by Racal Instruments, illustrating how the principles of design reuse and automation, applied to ATE systems, can dramatically reduce non-recurring engineering costs and accelerate schedules. Freedom Series is a modular approach to ATE system design. It exploits design reuse by standardizing components such as test instruments, interface cables, software drivers, and documentation. In addition, Freedom Series provides software tools that automate many non-recurring engineering tasks. The combination of modularity, reuse, and automation accelerates the system integration process and, in many cases, virtually eliminates non-recurring engineering costs.

The electronics industry and the Department of Defense (DoD), has thousands of obsolete legacy automated test systems (ATS). There are many systems, with different hardware and software architectures, that cannot be upgraded. The inability to reliably test products, diagnose faults, and collect historical data is having an effect on mission readiness. This paper describes a test and diagnostic system model that provides a means to use historical test and repair data from all levels of operation. The process reduces rework costs and decreases maintenance and repair costs through earlier and more accurate fault isolation. This work recoups the efforts of the original developer and captures test and diagnostic knowledge for the future. Consequently, the concept has been proposed for implementation within the Army ATS/TPS centers for use at the Army maintenance depots. Additional benefits from this work: development of a reliability database for system, subsystem, component by test type and ATS; tracking system reliability and mission performance data for use in developing requirements for new or upgrade system procurement specifications; and for pushing diagnostic knowledge and support from the sustainment level to the field and vice versa. The work presented will change the process of developing, maintaining and migrating diagnostic test now and into the future.

The IEEE-P1693, Modular Integration Packaging Scaleable System (MIPSS) standard as illustrated in Figure 1, defines the electrical and mechanical specifications of a modular interconnect packaging system design for Automatic Test System (ATS). It specifically describes a building block approach based upon the integration of three elements: (1) the outer enclosure and the inner Eurocard standard mechanical chassis that forms the mechanical structure of the building block with alignment features to mate with other enclosures [building blocks]; (2) a hopeful revision of the VME eXtensions for Instrumentation (VXI) chassis and component designs, that includes consideration of an IEEE-1155 backplane modification by the VXI Consortium Technical Committee [1], to add VME VXS 41.4 PCI Express serial bus control, with protocol enhancement under 2eSST, while the IEEE-P1693 working group continues to specify a new pluggable virtual power source, and mechanical extension that couples the VXI module directly to a transition panel that connects to an UUT or test interface choice emulating DOD Interface Standards [2]; and (3) the integration of the instrument modules and UUT personalty modules into a pluggable subassembly that interfaces with the basic enclosure building block.All of which is directly applicable to current DOD ATS (Fig.1).

In a move towards standardization of automatic test equipment (ATE), the US Air Force is enforcing utilization of modular ATE (MATE) guides in the development of test systems for both current and future avionics programs. The author discusses the design and production of thirteen automatic depot inertial navigation test systems (ADINTS), using the MATE guides. ADINTS is designed with accessible interfaces, large computer memory, reserved rack space and test table flexibility, all of which make it adaptable to many kinds of units under test. Of particular importance in testing inertial products, a real-time-controlled interface is available. The bus architecture complies with the MIL-STD-1553 A/B requirements. When coupled with the benefits to a depot of standardization, commonality of spare parts, and shorter run times, ADINTS has the potential to provide support to other military services and some commercial users of inertial products both in the USA and overseas, as well as the US Air Force. >

Industry today has a severe problem in the automatic testing of analog cards. At the Air Force Institute of Technology, we are developing an Expert System based on the structure and function of an analog circuit card to drive automatic test equipment. This system uses, the information contained in the schematic diagram of the circuit as well as fundamental knowledge of electronics and past experience in maintaining the card. One of the most important aspects of this system is its ability to reason about possible faults based upon the function of the subsections of the circuit. This task is accomplished using the type of "second principles" which an electronic engineer would use. It generates which tests the test equipment will conduct and, based upon the results of these test, determine the best test to perform next. In this paper, the basic reasoning mechanism for these systems is discussed.

Because of the poor reconfigurability of the existing test resource models and the faultiness of the intelligent modeling methods in automatic test system, the modeling method based on Multi-Agent was studied. By analyzing the characters of test resources, the test resource models were classified as device model, adapter model and configuration model. The typical test resource model based on Multi-Agent with three layers and five agents was built. The structure and function of system management agent, model reconfiguration agent, function management agent, channel control agent and function realization agent in the model were analyzed. Then its application in Intelligent Virtual Instrument was introduced. This model based on Multi-Agent has good reconfigurability and intelligence, and it can be used to build the general-purpose and intelligent automatic test system.

The portable intelligent troubleshooter (POINTER) system, originally developed for manual fault isolation, has been applied to intelligent automatic testing, which requires a fresh look at test program set (TPS) design from the perspective of testability theory and artificial intelligence. The resulting novel automatic test and diagnostic approach is a significant departure from conventional test programming techniques. A prototype automatic test equipment (ATE) system that implements a diagnostic control algorithm that computes a context-sensitive test strategy in real time has been developed. This control algorithm operates on a dependency model that describes the testability characteristics of the unit under test (UUT) and a test procedures file that contains the instrumentation setup for each test available for the UUT. This approach to automated diagnostics reduces time and costs in UUT repair. >

Lower frequency bands allocated for satellite communications use are rapidly becoming saturated due to steadily increasing demand. NASA has an ongoing program to develop the new technologies required to meet the demands of future systems. Under this program, higher frequency components and more efficient system techniques are being developed and tested. In order to accurately evaluate the performance of these technologies, an automated test system has been designed and built at NASA's Lewis Research Center. This paper describes the automated system's design and discusses its capabilities.

In the development of the fault diagnosis algorithm, it is necessary to verify its applicability and accuracy under various fault scenarios. A fault diagnosis module development and automated testing platform in the active distribution network is proposed. The platform includes two parts: the diagnostic module development system and the automatic testing system. The diagnostic module development system adopts layered architecture and is divided into three layers: the data interface layer, the phasor calculation layer and the diagnostic algorithm layer. A method for controlling PSCAD simulation using Python scripts to generate fault scenarios in batches is proposed. An automated scheme for fault data acquisition, diagnostic module testing, and formatted report generation is presented. Improve the development and operation efficiency by using the method of starting the simulation from a snapshot file in PSCAD and the way of compiling the development system into an executable file. The development and testing platform enable data standardization, functional scalability, and automation of test processes.