ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / In this paper, we present an approach towards achieving standards-based multi-vendor hardware configuration. This approach uses the Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) and a standardized web service Application Programming Interface (API) specification to allow any Instrumentation Support System (ISS) to control instrumentation hardware in a vendor neutral way without requiring non-disclosure agreements or knowledge of proprietary information. Additionally, we will describe a real-world implementation of this approach using KBSI‟s InstrumentMap application and an implementation of the web service API by L-3 Communications Telemetry East.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / In this paper, we explore ways in which CTEIP's integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) program can benefit from the hardware descriptions supported by the Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL). We describe how IHAL can be used at the end of the current iNET instrumentation configuration use-case to "fine tune" the instrumentation configuration. Additionally, we describe how IHAL can be used at the beginning of the current instrumentation configuration use-case to enable cross-vendor reasoning and automated construction of multi-vendor instrumentation configurations. Finally, we investigate how IHAL can be used within the iNET system manager to enhance capabilities such as instrumentation discovery.

ITC/USA 2008 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fourth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 27-30, 2008 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper describes the design and implementation of a test instrumentation network configuration and verification system. Given a multivendor instrument part catalog that contains sensor, actuator, transducer and other instrument data; user requirements (including desired measurement functions) and technical specifications; the instrumentation network configurator will select and connect instruments from the catalog that meet the requirements and technical specifications. The instrumentation network configurator will enable the goal of mixing and matching hardware from multiple vendors to develop robust solutions and to reduce the total cost of ownership for creating and maintaining test instrumentation networks.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / CTEIP has launched the integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) project to foster advances in networking and telemetry technology to meet emerging needs of major test programs. In the past these programs have been constrained by vendor proprietary equipment configuration utilities that force a significant learning curve on the part of instrumentation personnel to understand hardware idiosyncrasies and require significant human interaction and manipulation of data to be exchanged between different components of the end-to-end test system. This paper describes an ongoing effort to develop a measurement-centric data model of airborne data acquisition systems. The motivation for developing such a model is to facilitate hardware and software interoperability and to alleviate the need for vendor-specific knowledge on the part of the instrumentation engineer. This goal is driven by requirements derived from scenarios collected by the iNET program. This approach also holds the promise of decreased human interaction with and manipulation of data to be exchanged between system components.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Previously, we have presented an approach to achieving standards-based multi-vendor hardware configuration using the Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) and an associated Application Programming Interface (API) specification. In this paper, we extend this approach to include support for configuring PCM formats. This capability is an appropriate fit for IHAL since changes to hardware settings can affect the current telemetry format and vice versa. We describe extensions made to the IHAL API in order to support this capability. Additionally, we show how complete instrumentation configurations can be described using an integrated IHAL and TMATS XML. Finally, we describe a demonstration of this capability implemented for data acquisition hardware produced by L-3 Telemetry East.

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Previously, we have presented an approach to achieving standards-based multi-vendor hardware configuration using the Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) and an associated Application Programming Interface (API) specification. In this paper we describe the current status of the IHAL standard. Since the first introduction of IHAL at ITC 2006, the language has undergone a number of additions and improvements. Currently, IHAL is nearing the end of a 2-year standardization task with the Range Commanders Council Telemetry Group (RCC TG). This paper describes the standardization process in addition to providing an overview of the current state of IHAL. The standard consists of two key components: (1) the IHAL language, and (2), the IHAL API specification.

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / This paper describes a method in which users realize the benefits of a standards-based method for capturing and evaluating verification and validation (V&V) rules within and across metadata instance documents. The method uses a natural language based syntax for the T&E metadata V&V rule set in order to abstract the highly technical rule languages to a domain-specific syntax. As a result, the domain expert can easily specify, validate and manage the specification and validation of the rules themselves. Our approach is very flexible in that under the hood, the method automatically translates rules to a host of target rule languages. We validated our method in a multi-vendor scenario involving Metadata Description Language (MDL) and Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) instance documents, user constraints, and domain constraints. The rules are captured in natural language, and used to perform V&V within a single metadata instance document and across multiple metadata instance documents.