Analysis of test-diagnose-fix strategies analysis for complex manufacturing systems

An integration and test plan for a complex system contains many test phases. Planning these test phases becomes increasingly difficult, because of the number of components and complexity of these components. Structured methods to analyze and compare the performance for test plans developed for different disciplines are missing. This paper presents a method to analyze and compare test phases on time, cost and remaining risk, the three key performance indicators of a test phase. A test strategy consists of the following elements: a test sequence, test stop criteria and a test process configuration. A number of common test sequencing techniques, stop criteria and test process configurations are described in this paper. The basis is a system test model which is introduced first. This system test model can be used to describe the test cases and the system under test. It does not rely on specific mono-disciplinary knowledge. Several test strategies are analyzed for three cases to evaluate the applicability of the analysis method.