AN ADVANCED DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURE FOR REAL-TIME PROCESSING AND DISPLAY OF TELEMETRY AND SPACE POSITIONING DATA

Abstract

Rapid technology growth in the aerospace industry continues to manifest in increasingly complex weapons systems and system driven weapons systems platforms which must be supported in the flight test environment. This growth in complexity often surpasses the capabilities of many ground based real-time and post-flight processing and display systems, leaving these systems perpetually behind the power curve when compared to data/information processing, presentation and distribution requirements set forth by today’s flight test engineering community. Many flight test programs are accepting less than optimal results from these systems, therefore, the amount of information presently obtained (per flight hour) limits the results acquired during a test program, creating a more costly test and evaluation budget. As an integral participant in the development and testing of high technology aircraft and weapons systems, the U.S. Air Force Flight Test Center’s (AFFTC) Advanced Data Acquisition and Processing Systems (ADAPS) development is bridging the gap between requirements and capability by distributing current system architectures to provide incremental performance upgrades in specific areas of need in lieu of entire system replacements. This paper will discuss the current real-time processing, distribution and display capability that exists at the AFFTC and the planned phased upgrade of this tightly coupled system to a more flexible and extensible distributed architecture that will be increasingly responsive to the dynamic nature of test and evaluation of modern weapons systems and weapons systems platforms.