Six Issues in Testing Event-Triggered Real-Time Systems

Verification of real-time systems is a complex task, with problems coming from issues like concurrency. A previous paper suggested dealing with these problems by using a time-triggered design, which gives good support both for testing and formal analysis. However, a time-triggered solution is not always feasible and an event-triggered design is needed. Event-triggered systems are far more difficult to test than time-triggered systems. This paper revisits previously identified testing problems from a new perspective and identifies additional problems for event-triggered systems. The paper also presents an approach to deal with these problems. The TETReS project assumes a model-driven development process. We combine research within three different fields: (i) transformation of rule sets between timed automata specifications and ECA rules with maintained semantics, (ii) increasing testability in event-triggered system, and (iii) development of test case generation methods for event-triggered systems