SESAME: Specification-based tEsting of secure and SAfety-critical small-sized eMbedded systEms, IEE S.A.
The objective is to develop an approach for specification-based testing adapted to the needs and the constraints of safety-critical small-sized embedded systems. This approach aims to improve the efficiency of activities performed by test engineers, particularly during tests based on systems specifications. This approach must be founded on sound theoretical background and must be usable by test engineers. In particular, it will be a question of proposing a transformation language allowing the simplification of system specification models in order to facilitate the selection of test cases to perform. This approach should be integrated in a semi-formal approach for the specification and test of embedded systems. The formalism used for this study will be selected with respect to the recent UML2 notation standardized by the OMG in order to express functional, behavioral, structural, and real time properties.
It will be a question, initially, on the one hand of identifying and of formalizing a subset of diagrams and textual descriptions adapted to the UML standard notation for the specification of embedded systems, typically composed of specifications of functions, behaviors, structure, and real-time properties (for both hardware and software); on the other hand of identifying best practices of test cases reduction activities in an industrial context, in order to propose an approach tailored to automotive industry. On this basis, it will be a question, then, of defining the transformation language that will help generating a specification of a reduced test set.
The thesis lies within the scope of work of:
- ERCIM Working Group RISE on Rapid Integration of Software Engineering Techniques.
- ERCIM Working Group “Dependable Software-intensive Embedded Systems” focusing on safety-critical embedded systems.
- RTIST2 Network of excellence on their work on both hardware and software specification of embedded systems.
- The LASSY research projects of the University of Luxembourg, specifically, FIDJI and CORRECT, focused scientific approaches that uses architectural framework and model transformation; CORRECT specifically focusing on fault-tolerance research domain.
The results will enable the development of the work carried out by the aforementioned projects in specification-based testing, embedded systems specification and test, and the automatic generation of tests starting from industrial formalisms (such as SDL, statecharts, UML, etc).
The study of the methodology, in particular specification and test phases, will promote the ones integrated with software engineering tools. This approach will ease the evaluation within an industrial framework of the solutions suggested and, in the long term, their industrial transfer.
