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 / One of the principle goals of the Integrated Network Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) program is to help flight-test engineers configure their data acquisition systems more rapidly. This will allow them to focus more of their energies on the collection of data rather than on the design and configuration of their data acquisition hardware. Currently most flight-test engineers spend the majority of their time configuring their data acquisition systems to acquire data for test flights. Typically, the flight test engineers must manually transform the requirements that are given to them into actual measurements from the data acquisition system. This process forces the flight test engineers to become experts in the implementation details of their data acquisition systems. This paper will discuss a possible design for an automatic hardware selection system. This system would allow flight test engineers to step away from the implementation details of their data acquisition system and focus instead on the parameter data that the system is acquiring. The key design goal for this system is to create a mechanism that can automatically transform the requirements for a flight test program into a list of hardware that can accomplish the desired task.

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 / In this paper we describe extensions to the Instrument Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL). Since IHAL was first presented to ITC in 2006, a number of improvements were made to the design of IHAL. Major changes to the schema include splitting it into multiple XML Schema (XSD) files, separation of the description of instrumentation functions from the description of the hardware, and addition of a function pool.

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 / The development of network-based data acquisition systems has resulted in a new architecture for supporting flight instrumentation that has the potential to revolutionize the way we test our aircraft. However, the inherent capability and flexibility in a networked test architecture can only be realized by the flight engineer if a sufficiently powerful toolset is available that can configure and manage the system. This paper introduces the concept of an instrumentation configuration and management system (ICMS) that acts as the central resource for configuring, controlling, and monitoring the instrumentation network. Typically, the ICMS supports a graphical user interface into the workings of the instrumentation network, providing the user with a friendly and efficient way to verify the operation of the system. Statistics being gathered at different peripherals within the network would be collected by this tool and formatted for interpretation by the user. Any error conditions or out-of-bounds situations would be detected by the ICMS and signaled to the user. Changes made to the operation of any of the peripherals in the network (if permitted) would be managed by the ICMS to ensure consistency of the system. Furthermore, the ICMS could guarantee that the appropriate procedures were being followed and that the operator had the required privileges needed to make any changes. This paper describes the high-level design of a modular and multi-platform ICMS and its use within the measurement-centric aircraft instrumentation network architecture under development by the Network Products Division at Teletronics.

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 / Historically, different aspects of the configuration of an airborne instrumentation system were specified in a variety of different software applications. Instrumentation setup software handled the definition of measurements and PCM Formats while separate applications handled pre-flight checkout, calibration and post-flight data analysis. This led to the manual entry of the same data multiple times. Industry standards such as TMATS strive to address this problem by creating a data-interchange format for passing setup information from one application to another. However, a better alternative is to input all of the relevant setup information about the sensor and the measurement when it is initially created in the instrumentation vendor’s software. Furthermore, an additional performance enhancement can be achieved by adding the ability to perform sensor calibration and engineering unit conversions to pre-flight data visualization software that is tightly coupled with the instrumentation setup software. All of the setup information can then be transferred to the ground station for post-flight processing and data reduction. Detailed reports can also be generated for each measurement. This paper describes the flow of data through an integrated airborne instrumentation setup application that allows sensors and measurements to be defined, acquired, calibrated and converted from raw counts to engineering units. The process of performing a sensor calibration, configuring engineering unit conversions, and importing calibration and transducer data sheets will also be discussed.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 23-26, 2000 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / XML is a simple, powerful way to agree on data transfers between organizations, applications and/or computer systems. XML was originally developed to separate data content definition from the display of data on a web page. XML is based on a subset of the Standardized General Markup Language (SGML), which means XML uses a tag-based syntax similar to Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Whereas HTML uses fixed tags to display data, XML uses custom designed tags to describe data. XML provides a simple, standard, portable, and flexible way to transfer data between applications. This could provide a useful way to transfer telemetry attributes data between customers and systems. Currently, there is not a significant amount of support for the use of the Telemetry Attributes Transfer Standard (TMATS). Telemetry vendors still use their own formats, customers maintain their own databases, and support facilities/ranges promote the use of their own implementations. TMATS was supposed to define a common ground to transfer data definitions, but the tools to TMATS have not come about. TMATS is a well defined, structured specification that maps into XML extremely well. Even though XML is a fairly new technology, there are already many tools available to support XML parsing with more becoming available. This makes XML an excellent choice to supplement TMATS for the interchange of telemetry attribute information. This paper provides an initial attempt at defining the language and structure for an XML vocabulary of TMATS.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Visitors to web pages are, in most cases, restricted to viewing information the page designer has anticipated they will be interested in viewing. Many times this is adequate, but there are instances where the visitor wants the information they view to be based on selections they choose. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate anticipates selected customers will have a need to view very large data sets that vary from the satellite payload to the satellite state of health1, and will require controlling what they view in an “ad hoc” manner. In response, AFRL is using Java Server Pages developed within the data center to bring interactive and dynamic web page content to these customers.

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 / It is anticipated that XML will heavily dominate the next generation of telemetry systems. The syntax of XML-based languages can be constrained by a schema that describes the structure of valid documents. However, the schemas cannot express all dependencies between XML elements and attributes, both within a single document and across multiple documents. This prohibits the XML validation process from being fully automated with standard schema processors. This paper presents an approach that is based on the W3C Semantic Web technologies and allows different vendors and system integrators to independently develop their own semantic validation rules. The rules are equipped with powerful semantics, which allows for specification and validation of complex types of constraints. The approach is not specific to a particular T&E standard and is entirely standards-based.

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.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Computer Science and Information Systems / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy