CyFlex Design

CyFlex is the product of a very comprehensive design effort and many man-years of software development and testing. CyFlex has been designed to be a high performance, flexible test system to meet the wide variety of business needs of global manufacturers, but scalable to meet small individual test and measurement applications.  Larger organizations have found that by standardizing on the use of an integrated multifunction system with distributed capabilities benefits accrue due to: economies related to scale; the ongoing development and retention of knowledge; promotion of best practices; and the ability to rapidly and flexibly respond to changing requirements on a global basis. A strategically developed system can address needs that vary across products and environments, including the ability to support research, development, and production as well as varying laws, regulations and practices in different countries.

Numerous Considerations Were Addressed:

Business Needs

Must test:

• complete assemblies

• Compression of product development cycle time.

• Need for dramatically improved resource management

• Ever-increasing demands on test system performance and features

• New technologies entering the hyper competitive global market

Product Development Technical Needs

• Planned releases of more complex electronically controlled engines

• More stringent emissions regulations

• Evolving fuel system designs

Test and Measurement Technical Issues

• Evolving instrumentation standards, needs, and packages.

• New and changing test methodologies.

System and Software Development Technical Issues

• Evolving computing hardware platforms.

• Evolving software tools and platforms, including critical elements like operating systems, networking protocols, and product specific communication interfaces.

• System and software architectural considerations.

Constraints considered in the process of designing CyFlex included:

• Improving quantity and quality: The quantity and quality of test information can be dramatically increased, representing the opportunity to make more and better proactive product design decisions.

• Reducing or redirecting test operation labor expense: Increasing the level of test automation can provide opportunities to reduce labor expense or to redeploy labor into more value-added activities.

• Improving resource use and management practices: Improving automation can provide mechanisms to more easily achieve standardization, to manage resources, and to acquire management related information from a system. Large users, with  hundreds of component test stands worldwide, require that this information be reliably and consistently delivered to users when and where they need it with little or no human interaction.

In the face of all of these needs and opportunities, an integrated, multifunction, generalized test system was planned. The approach addressed the above needs and responded to a number of factors that were decision drivers:

• the magnitude of its need (hundreds of test cells and stands worldwide)

• the lack of a cost-effective, feature-rich commercial solutions

• the need for ongoing support, maintenance, and responsive extension

• the need to empower test cell users with the flexibility to modify functionality

The range of applications was considered, although the primary focus was on engine test cells. Disciplined architecture decisions and a focus on core, reusable services all resulted ultimately in a design that is multipurpose and has been adapted to a variety of test and measurement applications.

Given the uncertainty regarding future instrumentation and computing platform hardware, a great deal of focus was placed on using software components and development techniques that would lend the system well to the use of commodity commercial hardware. The system designers quickly recognized that the vast majority of value added in the test system would be through software functionality. Neither computing platforms nor general purpose measurement electronics were considered to be fixed elements of the system.

Developing a hardware independent system was a watershed decision for this type of system design.  Developing high-performance, capable software that remains hardware independent required a significant amount of design forethought. The use of a driver model that uses a standard interface and encapsulates hardware operations and differences supported the normally conflicting goals of hardware independence and high performance. Benefits of the approach included:

• ability to easily reapply the system in a number of hardware environments as a replacement to older software systems;

• better options to purchase the most appropriate and cost-effective hardware available at the time of implementation.

CyberMetrix developed the test system with a focus on high performance and range and richness of features. The richness of features extends to inclusion of functionality that some system designers might typically allocate to Programmable Logic Controllers and other highly reliable control systems, such as facility control and safety monitoring.

Feature richness and performance are supported by the use of a real-time operating system (RTOS) called QNX. This RTOS set then, and continues to set, the industry’s reference standard for performance and reliability or robustness. As an example, the fastest real time response with commercially based testing systems based on an NT platform is 5 milliseconds (.005 sec). The QNX based system is more than an order of magnitude faster.

CyFlex has met all objectives for flexibility!  This table identifies the range of solutions that the CyFlex system has provided a major engine producer.

The CyFlex system supports a significant amount of resource management offering a high degree of return on investment to customers. This comes in various forms, including:

• Increased test effectiveness: customers are able to perform tests that they had previously been unable to, and that other companies with similar product development test needs continue to be unable to perform. This increased test effectiveness provides advantages when evaluating new product technologies, addressing new regulatory requirements, and achieving product development time compression.

• Increased test throughput. Customers have achieved significant improvements in their test throughput - resulting in more tests of higher quality per unit time than has been previously experienced. Benchmarks conducted by CyberMetrix indicate that Customers enjoy between 3X and 10X test productivity compared to organizations with similar product development needs. These productivity gains are the result of: high degrees of automation, highly developed test methodologies, and careful facility management that minimizes intra-test time and planned and unplanned down-time. These test throughput gains require and are supported by business systems that support test data management and analysis, test planning, test resource management and other product development issues.

• Labor cost reductions due to high degrees of test automation.   CyFlex supports around-the-clock automated performance development testing. Staff support is often required only for periodic physical monitoring and maintenance of the test article and facility.

• Use of commercial-off-the-shelf hardware. Customers have been able to implement new test cells at a significantly lower cost than would be achievable using proprietary commercial solutions.

• Establishment and reuse of best practices. Due to CyFlex ubiquitous use, a major user has been able to develop and reuse best practice test methodologies. This has yielded results in terms of corporate knowledge retention, ability to shift staff roles without severely impacting product development schedules, and improving the quality of the product itself.

• Platform for real-time hardware-in-the-loop.   CyFlex has served as a base platform for hardware-in-the-loop simulations, allowing model developers to concentrate on the hardware simulation while using existing data acquisition, control, visualization, data analysis, and scheduling tools that are available as part of the CyFlex tool set. Parametric studies can be conducted on engines or electronic control modules on an around-the-clock basis.

CyFlex success is, in part, due to the degree of support it gets from management. This management support accrues in part due to the degree of integration and support  CyFlex provides to other business and information systems. Business systems that CyFlex supports include:

• test data repositories and analysis tools

• test planning and resource management tools

• utilization and metrics tracking tools

• engine control module communications tools

• vehicle modeling and simulation tools

The integration and support for these systems allows for flow of information in ways that support process driven activities, resulting in gains due to increased efficiency and product development time compression.

Capable, flexible, and extensible systems like CyFlex provide significant advantages to product development organizations.   CyFlex provides effective and efficient solutions to present and unanticipated needs.   CyFlex supports changes in development needs that result from market driven needs, regulatory compliance requirements, and new technology opportunities and challenges.

The capability and flexibility designed into the system support the ability to implement test systems rapidly at low cost. This enables using organizations to put in place solutions to solve problems in a time frame that results in maximum payback. Because system implementation costs are low, test solutions can be put into place on a temporary or provisional basis to solve short term problems. Resources can be easily deployed to other purposes at the conclusion of these efforts.

Ubiquitous use of a common system provides extraordinary benefits that result from the ability to standardize in a variety of ways. Test methods and specific test procedures are easily standardized and disseminated. Test information that is gathered is in standard, highly useable formats for subsequent data mining and analysis. More importantly, the use of a common system allows personnel to be shifted between product development programs, functional roles, and facilities to meet changing business needs in a manner that both allows them to contribute immediately to their new role, and that results in no loss of corporate knowledge.