Ground testing of flight software: Dynamically configurable hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the alpha magnetic spectrometer

Ground testing for the flight software of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) requires a virtual environment which processes commands from real controllers and provides normal or abnormal signals as needed. We introduced the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) concept but implemented the simulation in an innovative way that skips mathematical modeling. A simulation database derived from the real-time flight data provides a virtual environment, and a dynamic configuration mechanism makes the virtual world respond to the real world. This efficient method has been successfully applied in the ground testing system for AMS and the paper presents the methodology and its applications.