10/2006 : ExTraCT: A New Approach for the Transparent Test of Time-Triggered Communication Systems

RR Number

10/2006

Conference

ITG/GMM Workshop 2006

Author(s)

Eric Armengaud

Abstract

Testing is a fastidious task. Testing distributed real-time systems is even more complex since the scope is enlarged to process interactions and timing behaviors within the system. Time-Triggered Architectures aim at reducing the complexity by providing a deterministic, a-priori known schedule, which fully defines the process interactions and ease resolving timing constraints. While this architecture suits well to the dependability requirements of safety-critical automotive applications, it still does not explicitly provide means for verification and validation operations. Test execution typically requires intrusiveness to observe and control internal mechanisms, and service interruption to apply the test vectors to the system. Such requirements might be incompatible with the ones of automotive electronics. It is the aim of this work to present an approach for testing synchronous communication services such as the FlexRay protocol (a) transparently to the system’s architecture and (b) transparently to the system’s operation. After an analysis of the problem, our new approach supported by first experiments is presented, and finally the benefits and challenges are discussed.

Bibtex

@article{ armengaud:2006-10,
  author =       "Eric Armengaud",
  title =        "ExTraCT: A New Approach for the Transparent Test of Time-Triggered Communication Systems",
  journal =      "ITG/GMM Workshop 2006",
  year =         "2006",
  month =        "Feb."
}

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