Model-Based Testing for Objective Fidelity Evaluation of Engineering and Research Flight Simulators

Simulator fidelity has been defined as the conformance of a flight simulator to the characteristics of the real aircraft. Objective fidelity evaluation is an engineering approach that attacks the fidelity problem with comparison of simulator and the actual system behavior over some quantitative measures. Testing can be pronounced as the fundamental mean for this comparison. From the utilization perspective, flight simulators are classified as research, engineering and training simulators. Research simulators are both test beds for flight simulator research and computational tools for flight systems and human factors research. Engineering simulators are used for systems development and training simulators are utilized for flight training. While training simulators are subject to rare or few upgrades or modifications in their lifespan, engineering simulators are under occasional and research simulators are under frequent change. The test cases to evaluate the fidelity of training simulators are guided by standards whereas for engineering and research simulators, test cases may present a great variation depending on the scope of change and the use case. These two characteristics of engineering and research simulators, combined with the complexity of today’s aircrafts necessitate new methodologies for efficient and effective testing. Model-Based Testing (MBT) targets flexibility and adaptability via utilization of models for specification of test cases and proposes workflows for automatic test case generation. The paper presents an MBT approach for objective fidelity evaluation of engineering and research simulators. The proposed approach is exercised with an infrastructure implementation and an example case study. Thus, evidences are collected that indicate increased efficiency and an effective test process.