The joint acceptance demonstration of fault detection and isolation of the guided weapons test station

The AN/USM-659 guided weapons test station (GWTS) is a member of the DoD family of automated test equipment (ATE) which meets the defense industry´s need for a common munitions tester at the all-up-round (AUR) and guidance section levels. AU/USM-659(V)2 GWTS, which tests radiofrequency (RF) munitions, is currently undergoing acceptance testing at Raytheon Missile Systems Company (RMSC). The station is a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solution, composed primarily of VXI based instrumentation, with additional IEEE-802.3 and IEEE-488 controlled instrumentation where VXI instruments were not applicable. In lieu of a traditional first article test, RMSC and the Government agreed to perform joint acceptance demonstration (JAD) to demonstrate compliance to the GWTS prime item development specification. This process was managed by the respective RMSC and Government team leaders. One of the most complex areas of acceptance testing is the verification of the fault detection and isolation requirements in GWTS self-test. It is required to detect 97% of all GWTS failures. Once a failure is detected the self-test must fault isolate to a replaceable COTS instrument or equivalent level, and attain the required ambiguity group size requirements. The validation of these requirements is very costly and time consuming due to the complexity of inserting faults into a COTS test system. To more efficiently conduct this exercise the JAD team utilized a new fault insertion process