System Integration

Dedicated to the dissemination of System Integration information

The Needs of System Integration

In broad terms System Integration (S.I.) engineers need information from the system at different levels of abstraction and be able to capture that information at defined points in time, usually when a problem occurs.

 

They need to be able to state at the time the problem occurred ‘this was the state of the system’, ‘this state’ is a problem state as, at this point in time, the system did not work.  This will then allow the sub-system engineers to go away and recreate the problematic situation and, hopefully, solve the problem.

 

S.I. engineers also need to be able to monitor all the interfaces between the individual sub-systems; they need to do this to define the state of the system and to deal with situations where more than one sub-system reports a fault.

 

Thought should be given to self instrumentation of the system with an output in a format that generic test equipment can handle, e.g. a text file output that can be graphed in Microsoft Excel.

 

The demand for information, and data, from sub-system engineers is almost inexhaustible, if the capability is not built in at design time S.I. will not be as efficient as it could be.