Optimized Flight Control Component Testing Using Taguchi Design of Experiments
Yogananda Jeppu, K. Karunakar, PRAKASH R. APTE · 7th AIAA ATIO Conf, 2nd CEIAT Int'l Conf on Innov and Integr in Aero Sciences,17th LTA Systems Tech Conf; followed by 2nd TEOS Forum · 2007
Tagu chi Design of Experiments (DOE) has been used in manufacturing, marketing, chemistry and biological experimentation. Orthogonal arrays, a part of DOE, has been successfully used in reducing test cases for software testing. Safety critical applications requ ire extensive testing as proof of robustness for certification. Component based software development put restriction on the test cases that can be generated for an end -to -end test. A sample component based safety critical flight control software has been considered as an example for experimenting with the use of DOE. The aim of the exercise is to generate a single test case, which can test the scheduled two dimensional table lookup completely for its data tabulation and interpolation algorithm. 2D tables of gains and filter time constants are commonly used in flight control systems. A comparison with random test case generation and Genetic Algorithm has been carried to compare the efficacy of the DOE process. It is seen that a single test case can be generat ed by just 38 experimentations using DOE as compared to 300 test cases for random and 600 test cases in case of Genetic Algorithm.