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Technical Data Challenges in the Aerospace Industry
There are a number of requirements for data analysis software that are common across many different areas within the aerospace industry. These requirements usually make it difficult or impossible to use singlepurpose off-the-shelf applications to meet these specific needs. While there are many different areas where the broad functionality in the
PV-WAVE family is being used in Aerospace, we will concentrate on functionality used in three core areas: flight test, satellite systems, and ground control systems.
Some of these specific requirements include:
- The need for different types of tools depending on the project requirements and intended audience. These tools may include interactive desktop or web-based tools, or those needed to build applications for non-programmer end-users.
- The ability to read a large number of, often proprietary, data formats. This is especially true in flight test applications where many industry standard and proprietary instrument and avionics formats are used.
- The ability to read, manipulate and chart very large datasets. Flight test and telemetry files can range into gigabytes of data.
- Specific numerical analysis functionality such as signal and image processing and statistics. Signal processing is often important in analyzing flight test data, and statistical analysis is often important in monitoring satellite health.
- The need to access legacy code in C, C++ or FORTRAN, which could be existing code that needs to be reused or vendor libraries for data collection hardware.
- Hardcopy output and batch report generation is often an important requirement for flight test and satellite systems where post-processing and comparison of runs is required.
- The need to rapidly develop custom solutions and to re-use tools, code and expertise from project to project to control costs.
Technical Solutions for the Aerospace Industry
PV-WAVE is the core product in the PV-WAVE family. It is the fourth-generation language engine that provides the broad functionality and ease of use for many applications. It has functionality for data import/export, data manipulation, basic analysis, and user interface development. PV-WAVE Advantage includes the integrated IMSL numeric and statistic libraries, which provide a broad base of analysis useful in many aerospace applications. PV-WAVE Extreme Advantage includes IMSL and also the Image and Signal Processing Toolkits, which offer extensive functionality for state-of-the-art analysis in these areas. TS-WAVE is an application built using PV-WAVE for the analysis of time-series data such as used in flight test applications. It provides a powerful point-and-click user interface and is easily extensible using the PV-WAVE language and pluggable modules. JWAVE is a web-enabling technology to let you run PV-WAVE applications from remote locations using a web-browser.
Whether you need an interactive desktop solution to explore data and create one-off solutions, a custom application to perform analysis and generate plots, an off-the shelf solution that is extensible and easily imports complex data, or a web-based solution to share information with people outside of your group, the PV-WAVE Family delivers. It has the functionality you need in a flexible, open systems environment that easily adapts to your data needs.
This plot shows flight test data displayed in a user defined template using TS-WAVE. Pluggable data readers written in PV-WAVE allowed the proprietary binary format files to be easily read, and plots like this can be printed using exact centimeter or millimeter grids. This off-the-shelf solution has exactly the features needed by many flight test engineers and others doing time series analysis of large datasets.
Multiple Y axes and multiple plots per page are simple with TS-WAVE and PV-WAVE. This is important for displaying multiple time series variables.
PV-WAVE
PV-WAVE provides a broad range of functionality for many different kinds of applications, some of the specific functionality most often used in aerospace applications includes the following:
Data Access – PV-WAVE can easily read datasets of very large sizes, up to gigabytes, which are common in flight test and telemetry applications. You can import proprietary and custom data formats. Powerful “Data Connect” routines can read an entire ASCII file with one command. Binary data read/write is supported as well as import/export of a wide variety of image formats. Data can also be accessed from commercial databases.
Data Reduction and Filtering – Use PV-WAVE’s powerful array-based language to easily write code to subset, filter, and transform data. Benefits of this language include: A loosely-typed and extensible forth generation language with an interactive command line interface, array based language for operators and easy manipulation and subscripting of arrays, utilities for processing string and date/time variables, and SQL-like query functions for tables.
Data Analysis – PV-WAVE Advantage delivers powerful data analysis capabilities, which include the industry standard IMSL libraries of over 370 mathematical and statistical routines. Areas covered include: basic statistics, regression, correlation, covariance, analysis of variance, linear systems, nonlinear equations, transforms, quadrature, differential equations, optimization, interpolation and approximation.
Charting – With PV-WAVE, creating highly customized and interactive charts is easy. Functionality includes: 2D and 3D line, scatter, vector, bar, and contour plots, meshed and shaded surfaces, image processing functions and display, flexible axis, line and symbol styles, scalable/rotatable software/hardware fonts, comprehensive color table control, and OpenGL 3D graphics via the Visualization Toolkit (VTK)
Open System Platform – Call your legacy C or FORTRAN code from PV-WAVE, or call PV-WAVE directly from your own C or FORTRAN application. Support for communication between processes using operating system calls, pipes, remote procedure calls (RPCs), and sockets make it easy to develop client/server applications or communicate between PV-WAVE and other in-house or third party applications.
User Interface Development – Create simple to complex, platform independent user interfaces with ease. Comprehensive set of high-level and low-level widgets with resource file support and string services for internationalization.
Advanced Numerics and Graphics – While the above functionality is often used in flight test, satellite systems, and ground control systems, PV-WAVE has a wide breadth of functionality for use in advanced analysis using the IMSL libraries and signal and image processing toolkits, and in advanced visualizations using functionality such as the Visualization Toolkit.
2D time series plot showing PV-WAVE’s ability to create time series axes displaying year, month, day, hour minutes and seconds. Date Time variables are a basic primitive data type in the PV-WAVE language and make handling time series data easy.
WAVE> rand = RANDOMN(seed, 50, 50)
WAVE> rand = (rand + 0.6) * 10.0
WAVE> rand = SMOOTH(rand, 10)
WAVE> rand = rand(10:39, 10:39)
WAVE> shade_surf, rand
WAVE> floor = WHERE(rand LT 7.0)
WAVE> rand(floor) = 7.0
WAVE> shade_surf, rand
Powerful array based language allows you to rapidly develop applications. This is especially important when you need to develop custom project-specific applications as is common in aerospace.
Examples of other kinds of visualizations possible with PV-WAVE including: simulation visualizations, image processing and display, 3D surfaces, contour plots, time series plots, animations, and 3D vector displays using OpenGL accelerated graphics.
TS-WAVE
Flight test engineers and others needing a time series application use TS-WAVE, the leading commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution. TS-WAVE is a highly extensible application that allows plot creation and batch processing of your data for time-series data analysis. Time history and X-Y plots can be defined in an interactive mode that utilizes the Visual Data Analysis tool technology of PV-WAVE. These plots can be saved for future interactive data processing, for historical archiving of plots and for batch processing of data. TS-WAVE’s power lies in its ability to easily add User Functions, to access any PV-WAVE function, any mathematical or statistical function in PV-WAVE Advantage, or any function in an existing C or Fortran program. Other benefits of using TS-WAVE include:
- Performs all data analysis in one tool
- Easily extensible to add other analysis (IMSL®
mathematical and statistical library access)
- Highly flexible to support multiple groups
- Easy to use GUI; Minimizes learning curve
- Capable of reading any data file format
- Easily export graphics to other tools (Microsoft® Word)
- Easily connect to legacy code
- COTS package
- Used by test engineers and time-series customers
worldwide
This image shows the Graph Attribute screen from TS-WAVE. Plot variables and many plot attributes can be controlled from this
screen. The TS-WAVE application was written using PV-WAVE and demonstrates the kind of complex applications that can be created using the powerful PV-WAVE language.
JWAVE
JWAVE allows you to leverage code and applications that you have already created using PV-WAVE by web-enabling them for access across your enterprise. You can also use JWAVE to create applications from scratch. You can create web-enabled applications just using your PV-WAVE programming skills and simple HTML interfaces (using Java Server Pages), or create powerful Java applets or applications for true web-architected applications.
An interactive applet created using JWAVE for the analysis of time series data. The client side applet runs in a browser and supports interactive annotation and data zoom/pan. Most of the application logic runs on a web server and was rapidly developed using the PV-WAVE language. Datasets which are common in time series and ground control applications are often too big to send to a client but the JWAVE architecture allows you to keep the data and processing on the server, and just send resulting data and plots to the client browser.
| PV-WAVE Platform and System Requirements |
| PV-WAVE runs on most platforms, including Windows, Linux, UNIX, and OpenVMS. Code created using PV-WAVE is platform neutral, so it can run on any system. |
| Platform |
Operating System |
| SPARC |
Solaris |
| Intel x86 |
Microsoft Windows® 98/NT/2000/XP |
| Intel x86 |
Linux Red Hat |
| HP 9000/s700 |
HP-UX |
| IBM RS/6000 |
AIX |
| Silicon Graphics |
IRIX |
| HP/Compaq Alpha |
Tru64 UNIX |
| HP/Compaq Alpha |
OpenVMS |
PV-WAVE – A Valuable Solution for the Aerospace Industry
The PV-WAVE Family of products — PV-WAVE, TS-WAVE, and JWAVE — delivers aerospace engineers the tools to efficiently and accurately meet their data challenges, no matter what form or complexity they come in. PV-WAVE is particularly suited to the areas discussed in this paper – flight test engineering, satellite systems and ground control systems. It is able to read, manipulate, filter and display the large, complex datasets often encountered, and provide off-the-shelf or custom solutions to meet the particular needs of a project.
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