An automated test framework for hard real-time communication systems

Sammanfattning: As there are a plenty of new real-time communication network technologies popping up today, manual testing for the performance of these technologies becomes increasing time consuming and costly. In this paper, we designed and implemented an automated test framework with software and hardware modules which can be applied to different real-time communication technologies. As the test process is fully automated, users of the test framework can focus on high level logic for testing. We also carried out a pilot case on EtherCAT system and verified the result from our test framework with manual testing. Since another important target is that it should be portable to different system, we tried to modulize out design and minimize the amount work to test other real-time networks to save human effort.