For Immediate Release

Giordano Automation Releases New Maintenance Simulator Product

Giordano Automation announces the release of a new tool as part of their Concurrent Engineering Tool Set - a Maintenance Simulator. The Maintenance Simulator allows the user to simulate variety of maintenance environments early in a system development program. In the simulation, the user defines a series of fault events consisting of either single or multiple faults. Each fault event can be run against a number of maintenance scenarios which reflect different levels of test capability. The Maintenance Simulator identifies the resulting ambiguity group size, ambiguity group composition, and test resources used to isolate the fault events.

The tool represents the first product available off-the-shelf which provides detailed insight and analysis on the impact of test resource availability on actual field maintenance.

The Maintenance Simulator can also be used to verify fault isolation capability without the need for extensive physical fault insertion.

A free demonstration disk is available from Giordano Automation.

The impact of this technology is dramatic! For the first time engineers can design tests and map them to the heirarchical diagnostic knowledge base for each maintenance environment. In other words, the inference engine and knowledge base would operate with embedded tests (PM and BIT), and then with orgainizational tests (portable maintenance aids), followed by off-line depot test (large scale ATE). The user can simulate the diagnostician effectiveness in each maintenance environment before committing the tests or building the hardware. Concurrent engineering of support for diagnostics is now a reality!

Giordano Automation's Concurrent Engineering Tool Set consists of a development tool, the Diagnostic Profiler, and a run-time tool, the Diagnostician.

The Diagnostician will read test results and provide a diagnostic call-out. It does this by correlating test results to a diagnostic model of the item under test which is derived from CAD data (edif netlists) using the development system, the Diagnostic Profiler. The User identifies what tests will be performed in run-time and the diagnostic knowledge base is complete. Use of the Diagnostician will allow the writing of much less complicated test routines, because all of the diagnosic logic which is normally "hard-coded" into the test routine is contained in the diagnostic knowledge base. It is a simple process, and provides a comprehensive fault isolation capability without writing expensive diagnostic tests and flow charts.

The Diagnostician is a library of diagnostic services. It has been implemented on embedded computers and micro-controllers for built-in diagnostics, on portable maintenance aids in conjunction with interactive electronic manuals and in automatic test equipment in conjunction with test program sets. The same diagnostic knowledge base can be used across this broad spectrum of diagnostic resources resulting in a truely integrated diagnostic capability.

Since the Diagnostic Profiler also performs testability analysis and provides visibility of design issues up-front, relative to test and diagnostics, it also provides you with an overall concurrent engineering framework.

The cost of the Diagnostician software package starts at $2,000 for a single platform license. Quality discounts start at five platforms. It is available immediately.