Assembling and integration of the ALMA hardware in the loop simulation environment

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has been working in the operations regime since 2013. After almost 10 years of successful operation, obsolescence of hardware and software emerged. On the other hand, the ALMA 2030 plan will add new disrupting capabilities to the ALMA telescope. Both efforts will require an increased amount of technical time for testing in order to minimize the risks to introduce instability in the operation when new equipment and software are integrated into the telescope. Therefore, a process to design and implement a new simulation environment, which must be comparable to the production environment, was started in 2017 and passed the Critical Design and Manufacturing Review (CDMR) in 2020. In this paper, the current status of the project was reviewed focusing on the assembling and integration period, and use cases that are started to be built on top of this testing facility.