Mineral Wells Police Chief Dean Sullivan presented information at last week’s Mineral Wells City Council meeting concerning an opportunity for the city to evaluate a new crash reporting software system.

The system, known as Crash Reporting and Analysis for Safer Highways (CRASH), is provided by the Texas Department of Transportation at no cost to the city and allows the MWPD to test and evaluate its effectiveness.

Sullivan said the program is his department’s latest tool to increase efficiency among officers and provide more timely service to citizens.

He called it a “unique opportunity,” noting TxDOT approached the department with an offer to serve as a beta test site. He also noted he spoke with Department of Public Safety Sgt. Jeffrey Poole, who spoke favorably of the similar program his agency uses.

Since crash reports are among the most frequent calls for service, Sullivan said a time-saving program like CRASH will result in a noticeable improvement in officer effectiveness.

Officers responding to crash scenes will be able to submit crash reports directly from the field via Internet and more rapidly submit state-required reports to DPS.

Providing even more benefit, Sullivan said the CRASH system will work with the department’s developing partnership with Sam Houston State University.

The goal of that relationship is to establish a computer-aided dispatch and records management system through SHSU’s police information management system known as Criminal Research, Information Management, and Evaluation System (CRIMES.)

According to Sullivan, the CRIMES program contains a module capable of capturing data for the CRASH system. That interconnectivity will eliminate redundant input of information.

Officers will also be able to better analyze crash trends to determine the community’s needs and effectiveness of traffic patterns.

With the MWPD at the forefront as a testing site, Sullivan said he expects state officials will embrace the program for law enforcement across Texas.

Council members voted unanimously to approve a resolution authorizing the City Manager Lance Howerton to establish the agreement between the MWPD and TxDOT.

Source:http://mineralwellsindex.com/topstory/x503847773/MWPD-beta-site-for-new-software-testing

Consumer demand for new features and increasing regulations from governments and related organizations is fueling an explosion of embedded software in mechanical systems. Using a network of sensors and actuators, embedded software can sense and respond to user commands and external disturbances improving the performance and/or functionality of mechanical systems.

The most common example is the automobile which has grown from no embedded software to as many as 10M lines of code in a single vehicle in less than 30 years and is expected to surpass 100M lines of code within the next 2 decades. But this isn’t the only industry embracing the use of embedded intelligence. Aerospace, medical devices, energy harvesting and power generation have all been using embedded software in their systems for many years. Even white goods are well on their way down this path with smart washing machines and dryers that can contain as much as 100k lines of code.

This is great news for the continued advancement of these products, but for test engineers it presents a formidable challenge. The growing role of embedded software in these systems produces a proportional growth in potential errors affecting the quality of the system. NASA commissioned a study to see how few errors could be achieved in a complex embedded program and using all the resources and expertise they are known for were only able to achieve between 0.1 and 1.0 software errors (“bugs”) per 1000 lines of code. Unfortunately, the timelines and budgets allocated to find these errors are not and cannot grow proportionally. Given these two challenges it is clear that test engineers must find a way to test earlier, test more efficiently and test more thoroughly.

To accomplish these goals, engineers have expanded their testing tool belt to include smarter test systems that leverage the simulation models used in the design of the system. One example is hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing. HIL testing is used to test the software deployed on the production electronic control unit (ECU) without using the physical system it will be controlling. The test systems use models of the system and the environment it will operate in to simulate the electrical interaction between virtual system (or more specifically, its virtual sensors and actuators) and the actual ECU being tested.

Because these plant models are typically used by design engineers to develop the embedded software, they have sufficient fidelity for testing activities allowing the engineer to being the verification of the deployed embedded software before the mechanical system is even available. Also, because there are no “moving-parts” in this form of testing – only electrical signals from simulated sensors and actuators – engineers can use test automation to queue up a series of test scenarios to execute over night or during the weekend increasing test coverage. And finally, this approach allows test engineers to safely and repeatably create undesirable scenarios to verify the software’s ability to identify and handle faults in system operation.

While the use of HIL testing provides many benefits to the validation of embedded software systems, it does not eliminate the need to physically test the system. Instead, it allows more errors to be discovered and resolved prior to physical testing – minimizing the number of the more expense, less flexible testing tasks necessary to validate the system. As system designers continue to expand the role of software in mechanical systems, the efficient use of this and other smart testing techniques will be critical to their success by enabling projects to stay on-time and on-budget without sacrificing quality.

About the Author
Chris Washington is the segment manager for Embedded Software Validation and Real-Time Testing. During his tenure at NI, Washington has served as the product manager for NI VeriStand, LabVIEW Control Design and Simulation Module, LabVIEW State Chart Module, and LabVIEW for embedded applications. Prior to these roles, he spent three years in Detroit, MI, as a field engineer where he provided consulting and support services for various applications, such as hardware-in-the-loop testing; rapid control prototyping; noise-vibration-harshness testing; in-vehicle data logging; and real-time test cell development. Additionally, Washington has worked as an applications engineer and a LabVIEW instructor. He received his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University with a focus on digital electronics and control systems.

Source:http://www.tmworld.com/electronics-blogs/everyday-measurements/4402167/Smarter-testing-tames-the-explosion-of-embedded-software