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 / In this paper, we discuss the benefits of maintaining a neutral-format hardware specification along with the telemetry metadata specification. We present several reasons and methods for maintaining the hardware specifications, as well as several potential uses of hardware specification. These uses include cross-validation with the telemetry metadata and automatic generation of both metadata and instrumentation networks.

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 discuss ways in which web services can be used in future T&E scenarios, from the initial hardware setup to making dynamic configuration changes and data requests. We offer a comparison of this approach to other standards such as SNMP, FTP, and RTSP, describing the pros and cons of each as well as how these standards can be used together for certain applications.

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 / The next generation of telemetry systems will rely heavily on XML-based standards. Multiple standards are currently being developed and reviewed by the T&E community, including iNET's Metadata Description Language (MDL), the XML-version of IRIG 106, Chapter 9 (TMATS XML), the Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL), and the Data Display Markup Language (DDML). In this paper, we share design considerations for developing XML-based T&E standards, gained from our experiences in designing IHAL and DDML.

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 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 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 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 / The complexity of modern test and evaluation (T&E) processes has resulted in an explosion of the quantity and diversity of metadata used to describe end-to-end T&E processes. Ideally, it would be possible to integrate metadata in such a way that disparate systems can seamlessly access the metadata and easily interoperate with other systems. Unfortunately, there are several barriers to achieving this goal: metadata is often designed for use with specific tools or specific purposes; metadata exists in a variety of formats (legacy, non-legacy, structured and unstructured metadata); and the same information is represented in multiple ways across different metadata formats.

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 / The Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) has been developed to be a neutral language that is focused on the description and control of instrumentation systems and networks. This paper describes the various instrumentation configuration management tools we have designed that make use of IHAL’s neutral specification of instrumentation networks. We discuss the features currently present in prototypes as well as future enhancements.

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.