GETTING AHEAD OF THE GAME: QUANTIFYING THE VALUE OF LABORATORY TESTING PRIOR TO FULL-UP SYSTEM LEVEL

Program offices and the test community all desire to be more efficient with respect to testing but currently lack the analytical tools to help them fit early subsystem level testing into a framework which allows them to perform assessments at the system level. TARDEC initiated a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) effort to develop and deploy a system reliability testing and optimization tool that will quantify the value of subsystem level tests in an overall test program and incorporate the results into system level evaluations. The concept software, named the Army Lifecycle Test Optimization (ALTO) tool, provides not only the optimization capability desired, but also other key features to quickly see the current status, metrics, schedule, and reliability plots for the current test plan. As the user makes changes to the test plan, either by running the optimization or adjusting inputs or factors, the impacts on each of these areas is computed and displayed.