Test strategy component of an open architecture for electronics design and support tools

The authors describe work being carried out under the auspices of the artificial intelligence, expert system tie to automatic test equipment (AI-ESTATE) committee of the IEEE standards coordinating committee 20 (SCC-20). The goal is to develop a formal data model for dependency related information called an information flow model (IFM). The most important entities in the model are discussed, and a brief description of the model is given. The study attempts to place the IFM in the larger context of the Ada-based environment for test, and other related efforts are briefly described. The IFM standard will allow portability of dependency models between tools. The larger goal is to allow reasoners which use the IFM model to be plug compatible, in the true sense of the concept of an open architecture.<>