Test system consolidation

Test system consolidation has been going on in the U.S. Department of Defense for quite some time for multiple pieces of support equipment ranging from Automatic Test Stations to Common O-Level Test Sets to Common pieces of Mechanical Support Equipment. With regards to Automatic Test Equipment / Stations, each branch does have a standard family of test equipment. This is a big shift from the days when each weapon system had its own family. As test equipment and instrumentation have become more capable and more flexible, it seems likely that there really should be even fewer types of test systems. Yet each branch of the DoD has its own family of test equipment and they have to constantly work to enforce usage of the standard equipment versus proliferation of new types of test equipment. Still, the same item will have different test equipment for each stage of development and production. Each will have a different test approach, strategy, and implementation. This leads to issues with test repeatability, verticality, and compatibility which drive up life cycle costs and impede system readiness. This paper will describe the efforts to study the problem and provide results of the findings from a system integrator´s point of view. In addition to the analysis of the instrumentation typically found in a test system, the paper will discuss some of the features of system architectures that can enable consolidation such as translation tools. It will also discuss some of the impediments to test system consolidation such as legacy system emulation and compatibility. Finally, it will discuss the some of the system requirements that have typically driven systems to different solutions and provide recommendations to test equipment standardization.