Monitoring of Virtual and Hybrid Test Benches in the Cloud 2021-01-0007

In recent years, the concept of hybrid test systems consisting of real and virtual parts emerged in the aerospace industry. The concept features a communication infrastructure that provides the standardized transport mechanisms required for interoperability. For example, this allows system integrators to easily reuse and exchange laboratory tests means, even if they originate from different suppliers. The “Virtual and Hybrid Testing Next Generation” (VHTNG) research project aims at creating a standard for such an infrastructure. One central aspect is the unified monitoring and control of the test equipment. So far, VHTNG has primarily focused on monitoring and controlling related aspects of the test bench in a local environment. However, recent events have repeatedly shown that it becomes increasingly important to monitor and control test benches remotely. Furthermore, engineers will execute more tests in cloud applications in the future to efficiently parallelize computationally intensive simulation tasks and/or to make use of flexible storage options. Therefore, this paper explores the possibilities of using the test bench monitoring concept from VHTNG as basis for a unified cloud-based monitoring approach. It presents an architecture and a technology stack that enable users to monitor multiple test sites that can consist of one or several test benches via common web browsers. The approach has been developed based on a dedicated requirements analysis that considers security, maintenance, usability and costs. The paper discusses different communication technologies including their (dis)advantages and presents a prototype based on VHTNG and the Elastic Stack.