Environment modeling and simulation for automated testing of soft real-time embedded software

Abstract

Given the challenges of testing at the system level, only a fully automated approach can really scale up to industrial real-time embedded systems (RTES). Our goal is to provide a practical approach to the model-based testing of RTES by allowing system testers, who are often not familiar with the system's design but are application domain experts, to model the system environment in such a way as to enable its black-box test automation. Environment models can support the automation of three tasks: the code generation of an environment simulator to enable testing on the development platform or without involving actual hardware, the selection of test cases, and the evaluation of their expected results (oracles). From a practical standpoint-and such considerations are crucial for industrial adoption-environment modeling should be based on modeling standards (1) that are at an adequate level of abstraction, (2) that software engineers are familiar with, and (3) that are well supported by commercial or open source tools. In this paper, we propose a precise environment modeling methodology fitting these requirements and discuss how these models can be used to generate environment simulators. The environment models are expressed using UML/MARTE and OCL, which are international standards for real-time systems and constraint modeling. The presented techniques are evaluated on a set of three artificial problems and on two industrial RTES.

Execution of UML models: a systematic review of research and practice

“…As of today, a plethora of methods and techniques for executing UML models have been proposed (e.g., [26,31,47]). Each of these uses at least one of two possible execution strategies: translational or interpretive (see Sect.…”

Toward the tools selection in model based system engineering for embedded systems—A systematic literature review

“…For example, all selected researches have been thoroughly studied and analyzed in order to assign them to corresponding category. Similarly, each selected research is intensively studied and Di et al, 2013, Berrani et al, 2013, Stancescu et al, 2010, Ouchani et al, 2013, Bouquet et al, 2012, DeTommasi et al, 2013, Andrade et al, 2009, Bazydlo et al, 2014, Doligalski and Adamski, 2013, Mueller et al, 2010, Durand and Bonato, 2012, Moreira et al, 2010, Vidal et al, 2009, Linehan and Clarke, 2012, Herrera et al, 2014, Lecomte et al, 2011, Rafiq Quadri et al, 2012, Chen et al, 2013, Vanderperren et al, 2008, Elhaji et al, 2012, Riccobene and Scandurra, 2012Zohaib Iqbal et al, 2013, Chouali and Hammad, 2011, Doering, 2014, Ouchani et al, 2014, Telinski Wiedermann anger et al, 2013, Knorreck and Apvrille, 2011, Ge et al, 2012, Baresi et al, 2013, Huang et al, 2012, Nguyen et al, 2014, Bousse et al, 2012 Modeling 5 Gomez et al, 2012, Penil et al, 2010, Espinoza et al, 2009, Rota Sena Marques et al, 2014, Behjati et al, 2011 Property specification 2 Yin et al, 2013…”

Stimuli-SoS: a model-based approach to derive stimuli generators for simulations of systems-of-systems software architectures

“…Thus, we believe that our approach contributes to SoS software engineering by establishing a novel model-based approach to support SoS simulation and environment modeling. The automatic generation of stimuli generator for simulation of software architectures of SoS purposes is a contribution for Software Engineering for SoS and SoSE, as these techniques were broadly adopted for hardware benchmarking, but rarely applied in software engineering, in particular, software engineering for SoS; • Environment modeling: Environment modeling is an emerging issue, not only for simulation domain or SoS domain, but also for modern software engineering as a whole [60,61]. It is important to improve techniques and methods to model the surrounding environment in which systems will be deployed, predicting situations that could not be dealt with effectively without this type of modeling and preventing failures not envisioned before.…”