Diagnostic Reasoning has become essential and critical to the mission of DoD Automatic Test Systems (ATS). ATS architectural approaches to data have been built on monolithic solutions of tightly coupled automatic test elements. These solutions tend to be proprietary, costly to procure, maintain and upgrade and are non-interoperable with ATS elements of other manufacture. An architectural approach that lowers ATS costs, provides for robust non-proprietary solutions and supports longer ATS life cycles is the open systems approach as defined in the DoD ATS Master Plan (1). This approach requires the de-coupling of ATS elements and reengineers them as interoperable components based on "commercial off the shelf" (COTS) products. In our Phase-I study we created two component framework prototypes, one based on COM and one based on CORBA that utilized AT-ESTATE services to diagnosis faults on a breadboard circuit. In Phase-II we propose to take the next logical development steps and formalize and advance our open systems approach to interoperable component frameworks. We also propose to produce a working diagnostic tool that tests our component frameworks and the utility of AI-ESTATE services. The result of Phase II is a technological basis for commercializing our frameworks and components.
Benefits: Diagnostic reasoners, GUI's, Test Controllers and other componentized ATS elements can be used in both DoD and private sector ATS environments.
