Automation and Orchestration of Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing Processes

This paper proposes a system for automation and orchestration of software testing processes that include hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) devices. The testing setup comprises devices under test (DUTs) that run software that is being tested and HIL devices that provide real time simulation of the physical environment that DUTs interact with. For example, a DUT can be a controller for a wind turbine, while a HIL device simulates the power electronics stage in a way that the controller cannot tell whether it is plugged into the simulator or a real device. The main goal of the proposed system is to allow engineers to effortlessly manage and coordinate testing of such software, then collect and review test results from a single portal. This could be achieved by automating execution of tests and tasks that belong to HIL testing processes and orchestrating environments for testing by managing their settings and life cycle. While the test setup contains physical hardware and is typically deployed on-premises, the portal itself can be deployed in the cloud. This leads to the development of a hybrid, primary-secondary architecture. Several different automation and orchestration techniques of distributed computing systems are needed for this hybrid architecture. An intuitive user interface is also needed since the end users do not necessarily have the knowledge on distributed systems or complex software architectures.