Development and validation of production electronic test procedures through virtual airplane: A case study of an EMBRAER aircraft

摘要

The development process of electronic production tests at EMBRAER used traditional document centered methodologies, which prevented the anticipation of validation and verification process, thereby reducing the maturity level of the production test procedure applicable to prototype aircrafts. This paper proposes the use of Model-Based-Design and Model-Based Test (i.e. Virtual Airplane) as a new way to reduce the cycle of test development process and therefore, to improve the test maturity during aircraft prototype phase. To validate the new development process, two case studies were used to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of simulation models use, thus allowing a gain of continuous maturity improvement throughout all stages of the product development phase. This paper shows how possible it is to reduce the number of fault detection at prototype phase.