The Research And Development On The Air Traffic Control/Mode S Transponder Automatic Test System

Air Traffic Control(ATC) is playing a more and more important role in the rapid-growing aviation industry. As a crucial part of ATC, the ATC transponder is irreplaceable in keeping smooth and efficient air traffic. However, such avionics puts powerful pressure on its maintenance due to its sophisticated and advanced manufacturing technology. Existing automatic test systems require high finance investment, and are becoming difficult to manage when the number of systems rise up, which leads to the waste of labor, material and financial resources and productivity wipeout.The purpose of this paper is to design a generic avionics Automatic Test System(ATS) in view of the existing situation mentioned above. Accomplishing the automatic test procedure of Rockwell Collins TPR-900 ATC/Mode S Transponder(ATC Transponder) using this ATS can reach the purpose of replacing the dedicated ATS, cutting cost and increasing efficiency.The paper firstly presents an introduction on the history and development of ATC and ATS. Then a generic ATS design plan and technical details are given. The hardware platform builds up automatic test equipment based on ARINC Specification 608 A. The software platform chooses Qt and Lua as the base framework and Test Program Sets(TPS) language, and implements project management, equipment management, equipment driver encapsulation, and TPS edit, running and debugging. After that, the paper conducts a deep study on the concerned ATC Transponder, including its working situation and theory, with a complete hardware and software test plan according to its test requirements. At last, a complete test procedure is designed and performed, and the test results are given. Using the ATS designed in this paper would be easy to manage and extend, and the ATS requires low doorsill for developing and testing engineers, making it convenient and fast to perform automatic test.Finally the ATS is completed, with extendable and exchangeable test equipment on hardware platform, and resources editing and test program writing and running functions on software platform. Moreover, based on the test requirement of the ATC Transponder, the whole test procedure is carried out on the ATS.