Maritime test carriers are widely used for testing of assistance systems and autonomy systems on vessels. But in general, these test carriers are designed to test one System under Test. Especially with advancing development, a change in necessary functionalities may arise. This could include the introduction of novel sensors, actuators, navigation systems or other System under Test, which requires an extensible test carrier. To ensure extensibility and reusability, a test carrier system architecture is needed, that allows the integration of different Systems under Test, sensors and actuators taking also into account the complexity of these Systems of Systems. This paper presents a test carrier system architecture, which fulfills the requirements of reusability, portability and extensibility based on a zone-oriented Electrical/Electronic architecture from the automotive domain. The presented test carrier system architecture uses a central gateway in combination with zone domain controllers, governing specific functional zones of the test carrier. Furthermore, the integration and placement of Systems under Test inside the test carrier system architecture is identified. Finally, the test carrier system architecture is applied on two test carriers of a physical testbed and evaluated through three different use cases including an additional latency evaluation.
