Abstract: The feasibility study about the shaking table real-time substructure experimental method of an equipment-structure-soil system is discussed. The equipment-structure system is adopted as an experimental substructure loaded by a shaking table. Meanwhile, a finite-element model of soil is adopted as a numerical substructure after the degrees of freedom reduction. Real-time data communication occurs between the two parts during test. Based on a branch modal substructure method, the motion equation of an equipment-structure-soil system is deduced. The equation is converted and applied to the substructure experiment. Considering that the soil does not entirely enter the nonlinear stage under strong earthquakes, the local nonlinear soil model can be used as a numerical substructure and the equation of motion for the equipment-structure-local nonlinear soil system is derived using the branch modal substructure method and linear-nonlinear hybrid constraint modal substructure method. An equipment-structure-soil interaction scale model is designed and tested using the experimental method under different earthquake records. A good agreement is observed upon the comparison of results between the experimental and numerical calculation methods, which corroborates the reliability and validity of the proposed testing method.