In the VIVALDI initiative, KBSI is developing a method and supporting toolkit that provides test and instrumentation engineers and stakeholders with the ability to define rules and support verification, validation, de-confliction, and optimization (VVDO) of metadata and systems design.
Standards for test and evaluation (T&E) metadata—standards that bridge vendors and test elements—facilitate interoperability among instrumentation systems. While there are several mature standards for representing test and evaluation (T&E) metadata, these standards are limited to only capturing the syntax of the respective metadata. Minimal support, if any, is provided for verification, validation, de-confliction, and optimization (VVDO) of the descriptions developed using the standards. To perform even simple VVDO of instrumentation systems, users must rely on proprietary or custom software, and procuring these solutions drastically cuts into the potential savings from metadata standards.
In the Verification and Validation of Metadata for Test & Evaluation (VIVALDI) initiative, KBSI is developing a method and supporting toolkit that provides test and instrumentation engineers and T&E stakeholders the ability to define rules and support VVDO of metadata and systems design relating to multi-vendor test and instrumentation systems.
The VIVALDI method and toolkit will provide the next level of interoperability, which involves semantic VVDO within XML metadata standards as well as VVDO across XML standards. The VIVALDI solution will include the capability to easily capture the rules, a standards-based format for storing the rules in a machine interpretable way and open source inference engines for evaluating the rules. The technology allows instrumentation engineers to describe the network details and measurements to collect using the MDL standard and pass that metadata description to the test engineer for setup and configuration. Instrumentation engineers can also describe the PCM transmission format using the TMATS XML standard and share that metadata description and can describe the details of the hardware using the IHAL XML standard and share that metadata description with vendors and other instrumentation engineers.
The descriptions are used for selecting specific instrumentation hardware and the subsequent configuration of the hardware settings for a specific test. These specific test metadata descriptions can be packaged, shared with all stakeholders, and understood by all standards-compliant software supporting the test. The presence of these standards could yield cost savings of approximately $1M annually for U.S. aircraft manufacturers.