Diagnostic Profiler: Diagnostic Design Software

The Concurrent Engineering Tool Set is very powerful because it focuses on run- time - providing a fault isolation capability that you can host in virtually any environment. It also focuses on the "process" of concurrent engineering for support, so our complete tool set supports an integrated product development process.

The Concurrent Engineering Tool Set consists of a development tool, the Diagnostic Profiler, and a run-time tool, the Diagnostician.

The Diagnostician, in run-time, will read test results and interpret the cones of evidence produced by pass and fail data to provide a diagnostic call-out. It does this by correlating test results to a diagnostic model of the item under test. The model is derived from CAD data (edif netlists) using our development system, the Diagnostic Profiler. You identify what tests will be available in run-time and the diagnostic knowledge base is complete. Use of the Diagnostician will allow you to write much less complicated test programs: all of the diagnostic logic that is normally "hard-coded" in the test program is now contained in the diagnostic knowledge base. It is a very simple process, and provides you with a comprehensive fault isolation capability without writing expensive diagnostic tests and flow charts.

Since the Diagnostic Profiler also performs testability analysis and provides visibility of test/diagnostics design issues up-front, it also provides an overall concurrent engineering framework.

Using the Diagnostic Profiler, a diagnostic representation, or model, of the system and its constituent elements is derived directly from CAD data. The model is a representation of the diagnostic behavior of the system: how faults propagate out to points where they are observable by tests or monitoring points. The model, when first translated from design data is based upon component definition, signal flow, hierarchy and interconnectivity. The engineer uses the Diagnostic Profiler tools to add information regarding the functional coverage of actual and/or proposed tests (possible test alternatives). The alternatives can reflect different maintenance strategies, test resources, test scenarios and so forth. The Diagnostic Profiler calculates testability statistics to determine the effectiveness of the test alternatives. Since the result of the analysis, the model, is deployed as the diagnostic capability, this analysis is not a hypothetical, paper based analysis, but rather is a profile of the actual diagnostic effectiveness to be achieved in run-time.

The Diagnostic Profiler contains a number of tools and utilities that step you through the process of generating a model-based diagnostic capability. The user interface is a series of tabs that represent specific functions that are perfomed sequencially through the development process. These functions include: