A distributed and reusable workflow-based auto test framework for distributed integrated modular avionics

Distributed Integrated Modular Avionics (DIMA) has been the future development direction of the avionic system. In DIMA, a large number of distributed modules use standard buses to communicate with each other, and their complex interactions make the test system for DIMA quite challenging. The challenge comes mainly from two aspects: the number of modules and the flexible communication methods among the modules. Traditional test system for DIMA has many limitations, (1) accessing the hardware directly so that the test programs are usually hard to reuse; (2) the debugging and error-finding of the test programs are difficult; (3) due to the lack of uniform standards, different data formats cause great inconvenience to the data sharing; (4) functional simplex and being unable to make full use of the system resources. The flexibility of DIMA make it unsuitable to persist in traditional test system. In order to avoid these limitations and keep the generality and reusability of the test system, we propose a distributed reusable workflow-based auto test framework for DIMA which (1) isolate the software and hardware completely by using a real-time publish and subscribe service; (2) use a well-defined workflow models to describe the test process; (3) use a general format to record and exchange values of measurements and tests; (4) take full advantage of the system resources and provide higher expansibility; (5) provide interoperability between different computer systems on the Internet by using Representational State Transfer (REST) web services. An Browser/Server (B/S) based implementation is also developed in this paper to demonstrate the proposed framework. The technologies we used mainly include workflow model, object oriented technology, multithreading technology, distributed task queue, REST web services and others. The practice shows that this framework is very effective and can be combined with many other software development technologies smoothly.