May 31, 2013: The NASA JSC Software Awards Selection Committee has chosen the Partition Level Application Test for Orion (PLATO) development team for the 2013 JSC Exceptional Software Award. PLATO is a software tool developed by NASA ER6 with a development team that includes several Odyssey engineers. One major component, Host Operated Memory Examination and Replacement (HOMER), was designed and written exclusively by Odyssey. Odyssey team members also contributed directly to PLATO integration with HOMER and the Orion AutoVTB. PLATO is an application that allows the sending of data and commands to the Orion prototype flight software, and analysis of results, in real time. Rather than using offline analysis tools to sift through data recordings to ensure a test case executed correctly, the PLATO script immediately returns pass or fail. This also allows NASA to run existing tests on new versions of flight software, completely automating regression testing.
HOMER, developed completely by Odyssey, provides PLATO an interface to flight software running in a simulated environment, Simics. With HOMER and Simics, the actual target flight binary can be loaded onto the simulated environment. The simulated environment provided by HOMER allows a tester to run a test at any time without scheduling expensive resources. This also allows for completely automated checkout, building, loading, and testing of flight software and is thus an invaluable capability for the Orion program.
Congratulations to the Odyssey engineers receiving this award!
