Award for HIL automated validation test application

When developing a system it is a good idea to implement verification and validation testing during its initial stages of development. This way errors can be identified and corrected in time, thereby reducing development costs and times, and ensuring the quality of the end product.

However, due to production, cost or space constrains, there is often no actual plant where the system can be installed to perform said tests.

For such situations, the engineers at ULMA Embedded Solutions have developed an automated validation test application that employs hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), a method used to validate systems without requiring an actual plant.

The application has been used to simulate different behaviours of an industrial washer, with models designed using NI LabVIEW and Mathworks Simulink, and their behaviour simulated for all possible scenarios using NI VeriStand. The National Instruments TestStand tool has also been integrated, which also enables use to generate and execute the different test sequences automatically, to cover all possible scenarios and behaviours.

This enables a system's different functionality and behaviour to be verified and validated, and has been awarded by National Instruments in the competition for best application 2016.