Protocol techniques for testing radiotherapy accelerators

Abstract

The nature of radiotherapy accelerators is briefly explained. It is argued that these complex safety-critical systems need a systematic basis for testing their software. The paper describes a novel application of protocol specification and testing methods to radiotherapy accelerators. An outline specification is given in Lotos (Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification) of the accelerator control system. It is completely infeasible to use this directly for test generation. Instead, specification inputs are restricted using annotations in a Parameter Constraint Language. This is automatically translated into Lotos and combined with the accelerator specification. It then becomes manageable to generate tests automatically of the actual accelerator to check that it agrees with its specification according to the relation ioconf (input-output conformance). Sample input annotations, their translation to Lotos, and the resulting test cases are described.