Future-proofing digitalisation of a frequency measurement service

The National Physical Laboratory is establishing a set of new measurement services in Time and Frequency to support research and industry users by delivering reference signals and by providing new testing facilities. A microwave and radio frequency measurement service are part of the service portfolio. To increase the service efficiency and to create a blueprint for digitalisation of other services, a multi-disciplinary team of domain experts, data scientists and information technology specialists set out to create a future-proof system that will capture, annotate, collate, process, and store the data from its generation on the instrument to the delivery to the customer as a measurement report. System Engineering methodologies together with Object-Oriented Design and software engineering tools were used to analyse the requirements and to prepare a set of models that will inform the system prototype development. This paper describes the approach used for the design and presents example system models, architecture scenarios and data models.