TBMS Version 1.0: Documentation for the Test Bench Management Suite

Abstract

The Test Bench Management Suite (TBMS) is a collection of multiple programs that helps configuring Delphin's ProfiSignal. ProfiSignal is a program for measurement data acquisition. Therefore, a program called "DataService" must be setup. The "DataService" collects the data from the measuring instrument. For each property, you want to measure, you need to configure a so called channel. Each channel tells the "DataService", all important data about the measurement variable. For example, where to get the data from this variable or the unit of this variable. Additionally, there might be some channels, that use some other channels to calculate a value. Those channels are called calculation channels. All channels need to be setup before a measurement is started. There are two possibilities, to a channels. The first one is to use the "DataService-Configurator" and add each channel one by one. But it is quite common, that there are several thousands of channels. Configuring them one by one is not applicable. Because of that, you can setup channels with the "XML-Configurator". This tool expects a Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that stores all information's that are needed to setup all channels. In the following, those files are called "xml-configuration files".

It has established itself, that the configuration (definition of all channels) is done via the Generic Instrumentation List (GIRL). The GIRL is an Excel file in which each channel is described in one row. But ProfiSignal cannot be configured with the help of an excel file. Because of that, the GIRL needs to be converted into a valid XML file, that can be read by the "XML-Configurator".

TBMS is a modular collections, that allows performing this conversion. Additionally, it provides some mechanism, to facilitate the configuration of ProfiSignal. For example, it can be used to create a history, of all configurations. Also, TBMS can generate a xmlconfiguration file that only contains differences to the current configuration. Those bot features might be helpfully, if there are multiple configurations during a single measuring campaign. TBMS is also able to automatically execute the "XML-Configurator". Last but no least, you can generate multiple XML configuration files from a single GIRL, which is important, if you want to configure multiple "DataService's".