Re-hosting measurements in the real world - overcoming implicit design factors that influence measurements

The Department of Defense (DoD) spent over $50B developing Automatic Test Systems (ATS) in the 1980´s. Today many of these systems are targeted for replacement or upgrade to eliminate downtime caused by obsolete test instruments. To be successful, these replacements and upgrades must accurately re-host (or move) all the measurements taken with the obsolete instrument to corresponding measurements in the replacement system. Syntactically this is often straightforward, involving translation of the original test program or bus commands to new commands. Semantically though, this can be quite challenging due to implicit design factors that influenced the original measurements. These factors must be identified and replicated in the replacement system before the new system will provide identical measurement performance. Using a real-world measurement re-host application, this paper categorizes and describes the implicit factors discovered in this Navy replacement effort, presents the accommodations that were made to correct for these factors and suggests guidance to reduce risk and cost for others seeking to re-host measurements.