Testing Framework for Real-time And Embedded Systems

Real-time reactive and embedded systems are usually used in circumstances where safety is important and the margin for error is narrow. These kinds of systems have applicability in a broad band of domains such as: automotive, avionics, air traffic control, nuclear power stations, industrial control, etc. As the name denotes, the main feature of “realtime” systems is the criticality of their timeliness. Guaranteeing a certain timeliness requires appropriate testing. As manual testing is burdensome and error prone, automated testing techniques should be developed. Although the importance of having a standard environment for automatic testing is high, the technologies in this area are not sufficiently developed. This thesis reviews the standardised test description language “Testing and Test Control Notation version 3 (TTCN-3)” as a means for real-time testing and it proposes extensions to enable real-time testing with TTCN-3. The aim is to provide a complete testing solution for automatic functional and real-time testing, built around this already standardised testing language. The solution includes an environment for designing and running the tests written in the extended language. As a proof of concept, test examples, designed using the enhanced TTCN-3, are mapped to real-time platform implementations and the timeliness of each implementation is analysed.