Generating test sequences using symbolic execution for event-driven real-time systems

Abstract

Real-time software, often used to control event-driven process control systems, is usually structured as a set of concurrent and interacting tasks. Therefore, output values of real-time software depend not only on the input values but also on internal and nondeterministic execution patterns caused by task synchronization. In order to test real-time software effectively, one must generate test cases which include information on both the event sequences and the times at which various events occur. However, previous research on real-time software testing focused on generating the latter information. Our paper describes a method of generating test sequences from a Modechart specification using symbolic execution technique. Based on the notion of symbolic system configurations and the equivalence definitions between them, we demonstrate, using the railroad crossing system, how to construct a time-annotated symbolic execution tree and generate test sequences according to the selected coverage criteria. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.