Using contract-based component specifications for virtual integration testing and architecture design

Damm, Werner; Hungar, Hardi; Josko, Bernhard; Peikenkamp, Thomas; Stierand, Ingo

doi:10.1109/date.2011.5763167

Cited by 82 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…An in-depth discussion about virtual integration can be found in [8]. In [8] contracts were extended by so called weak assumptions.…”

Section: Formal Underpinning and Validation Of Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [8] contracts were extended by so called weak assumptions. Weak assumptions are used to describe a set of possible environments in which the component guarantees different behaviors.…”

Section: Formal Underpinning and Validation Of Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The algorithm traverses all assumptions and guarantees to make sure that they match. A tool for checking the refinement between contracts called OCRA (Othello Contracts Refinement Analysis) was presented in [8]. It provides means for checking the contracts specified in a pattern based language called Othello, which are later translated to a linear-time temporal logic for discrete and real-time constraints.…”

Section: Related Work Regarding Contract-based Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contract-Based Design of Embedded Systems Integrating Nominal Behavior and Safety

Kaiser¹,

Weber

Oertel

et al. 2015

CSIMQ

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Abstract. The distributed design process for safety-critical embedded systems has become an increasingly difficult challenge: Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in vehicles, for instance, participate in many vehicle functions, while each vehicle function, in turn, is spread across several ECUs. Many suppliers participate in systems design and many partial functions are reused from past projects, not always knowing the assumptions at the time of their development. In particular, efficient allocation of safety mechanisms and a sound safety case are difficult tasks for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Contractbased development has gained popularity as an approach for supporting distributed development by explicitly annotating assumptions and guarantees to components, but an integrated process covering specification of nominal behavior and safety has not been described so far. We present such an integrated development approach that encompasses the systematic breakdown of nominal system behavior using contracts, the consistent derivation of safety analysis by interpreting several types of contract violations as a specification for failure modes, and the subsequent integration of safety mechanisms that cover these failure modes through safety contracts. The approach equally fits hardware and software and is therefore applicable on the system level. We demonstrate it by an electric drive example. The extensibility of our approach towards Cyber Physical Systems, which compose themselves at runtime, is briefly outlined at the end of the article.

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“…An in-depth discussion about virtual integration can be found in [8]. In [8] contracts were extended by so called weak assumptions.…”

Section: Formal Underpinning and Validation Of Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [8] contracts were extended by so called weak assumptions. Weak assumptions are used to describe a set of possible environments in which the component guarantees different behaviors.…”

Section: Formal Underpinning and Validation Of Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Work Regarding Contract-based Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contract-Based Design of Embedded Systems Integrating Nominal Behavior and Safety

Kaiser¹,

Weber

Oertel

et al. 2015

CSIMQ

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“…e.g., [3][4][5]15,17,18,22,29]), is an emerging paradigm for correct-by-construction systems which structures components properties into contracts. A contract specifies the properties assumed to be satisfied by the component environment (assumptions), and the properties guaranteed by the component in response (guarantees).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tightening the contract refinements of a system architecture

Cimatti

Demasi

Tonetta

2018

Form Methods Syst Des

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Contract-based design is an emerging paradigm for correct-by-construction hierarchical systems: components are associated with assumptions and guarantees expressed as formal properties; the architecture is analyzed by verifying that each contract of composite components is correctly refined by the contracts of its subcomponents. The approach is very efficient, because the overall correctness proof is decomposed into proofs local to each component. However, the process for the contract specification and refinement is quite expensive because the requirements are formalised into formal properties, where part of the complexity is delegated to the designer, who has the burden of specifying the contracts. Typical problems include understanding which contracts are necessary, and how they can be simplified without breaking the correctness of the refinement and other refinements in case some subcontracts are shared. In this paper, we tackle these problems by proposing a technique to understand and simplify the contract refinements of a system architecture during the development process for the contract specification and refinement. The technique, called tightening, is based on parameter synthesis. The idea is to generate a set of parametric proof obligations, where each parameter evaluation corresponds to a variant of the original(s) contract refinement(s), and to search for tighter variants of the contracts that still ensure the correctness of the refinement(s). We cast this approach in the OCRA framework, where contracts are expressed with LTL formulas, and we evaluate its performance and effectiveness on a number of benchmarks.

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“…It comprises different level of granularity. In case of a component-based design [5] the unit-tests have to validate that each individual component fulfills its requirements. The integrationtests deal with the problems that arise through the combination of multiple components and have to ensure their correct interaction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sequence Diagram Test Case Specification and Virtual Integration Analysis using Timed-Arc Petri Nets

Sieverding¹,

Ellen²,

Battram³

2013

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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In this paper, we formally define Test Case Sequence Diagrams (TCSD) as an easy-to-use means to specify test cases for components including timing constraints. These test cases are modeled using the UML2 syntax and can be specified by standard UML-modeling-tools. In a component-based design an early identification of errors can be achieved by a virtual integration of components before the actual system is build. We define such a procedure which integrates the individual test cases of the components according to the interconnections of a given architecture and checks if all specified communication sequences are consistent. Therefore, we formally define the transformation of TCSD into timed-arc Petri nets and a process for the combination of these nets. The applicability of our approach is demonstrated on an avionic use case from the ARP4761 standard.

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Using contract-based component specifications for virtual integration testing and architecture design

Cited by 82 publications

References 8 publications

Contract-Based Design of Embedded Systems Integrating Nominal Behavior and Safety

Contract-Based Design of Embedded Systems Integrating Nominal Behavior and Safety

Tightening the contract refinements of a system architecture

Sequence Diagram Test Case Specification and Virtual Integration Analysis using Timed-Arc Petri Nets

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