Tata Research Development and Design Centre, Pune, India
SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
Control systems for Radio Astronomy projects such as MeerKAT* require testing functionality of different parts of the Telescope even when the system is not fully developed. Usage of software simulators in such scenarios is customary. Projects build simulators for subsystems such as Dishes, Beamformers and so on to ensure the correctness of a) their interface to the control system b) logic written to coordinate and configure them. However, such simulators are developed as one-offs, even when they implement similar functionality. This leads to duplicated effort impacting large projects such as Square Kilometer Array**. We leverage the idea of data driven software development and conceptualize a simulation framework that reduces the simulator development effort, to mitigate this: 1) capturing all the necessary information through instantiation of a well-defined simulation specification model, 2) configuring a reusable engine that performs the required simulation functions based on the instantiated and populated model provided to it as input. The results of a PoC for such a simulation framework implemented in the context of Giant Meter-wave Radio Telescope*** are presented.
*MeerKAT CAM Design Description, DNo M1500-0000-006, Rev 2, July 2014
**A.R. Taylor, "The Square Kilometre Array", Proceedings IAU Symposium, 2012
***www.gmrt.ncra.tifr.res.in
