Development of a Cable Test Management System (CTMS) Application Available to Purchase

The Test & Trials Department at HII-Ingalls Shipbuilding is responsible for testing specified electrical cables installed on ships under construction at Ingalls Shipbuilding. These tests are conducted on ships which can have tens of thousands of cables pulled, thus HII-Ingalls Shipbuilding personnel must manage a large amount of cable business data. The various tests are performed by skilled Test Conductors using a largely manual, paper-based process to gather and manage the test data. Test & Trials Department personnel maintain these datasets and associate specific Test Procedures to ship equipment operating requirements by cable or circuit type. CTMS required developing two way communications: 1) Between the CN3 mobile device and a windows computer with an Access database containing specific cable information and used as a repository for the actual test results and 2) Between the CN3 mobile device and the test equipment to pass specific test criteria to the test equipment and the test conductor and to capture the actual results. Custom device drivers were written to allow direct serial communication between the Intermec CN3 handheld computer and the Anritsu Site Master™ S820D Analyzer. This setup allowed the team to meet the goals of the project; leveraging existing devices to improve data reliability and expose new potential for process improvement in the cable test environment.