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Constraint-based test generation for automotive operating systems

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Abstract

This work suggests a method for systematically constructing a software-level environment model for safety checking automotive operating systems by introducing a constraint specification language, OSEK_CSL. OSEK_CSL is designed to specify the usage constraints of automotive operating systems using a pre-defined set of constraint types identified from the international standard OSEK/VDX. Each constraint specified in OSEK_CSL is interpreted as either a regular language or a context-free language that can be checked by a finite automaton or a pushdown automaton. The set of usage constraints is used to systematically classify the universal usage model of OSEK-/VDX-based operating systems and to generate test sequences with varying degrees of constraint satisfaction using LTL model checking. With pre-defined constraint patterns and the full support of automation, test engineers can choose the degree of constraint satisfaction and generate test cases using combinatorial intersections of selected constraints that cover all corner cases classified by constraints. A series of experiments on an open-source automotive operating system show that our approach finds safety issues more effectively than conventional specification-based testing, scenario-based testing, and conformance testing.

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Notes

  1. We could not apply a C code model checker directly for system-level model checking since the code is dependent on the hardware platform, e.g., code for context switching.

  2. A regular language can be formalized using a finite automaton which is a case of pushdown automaton.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by Korean Government (NRF-2012S1A2A1A01031160) and the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (NIPA-2014-H0301-14-1023) supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea

    Yunja Choi & Taejoon Byun

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  1. Yunja Choi
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  2. Taejoon Byun
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Correspondence to Yunja Choi.

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Communicated by Prof. Hierons, Prof. Merayo and Prof. Bravetti.

This is an extended version of [1].

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Choi, Y., Byun, T. Constraint-based test generation for automotive operating systems. Softw Syst Model 16, 7–24 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0449-6

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