Modeling property based stream templates with TTCN-3

Abstract

Test evaluation and test assessment is a time consuming and resource intensive process. More than ever this holds for testing complex systems that emanate continuous or hybrid behavior. In this article we introduce an approach that eases the specification of black box tests for hybrid or continuous systems by means of signal properties applied for evaluation. A signal property allows the characterization of individual signal shapes. It is determined by the examination of the signal's value at time, the application of pre-processing functions (like first or higher order derivatives), and the analysis and detection of sequences of values that form certain shapes of a signal (e.g. local minima and maxima). Moreover we allow the combination of properties by logical connectives. The solution provided in this paper is based on terms and concepts defined for Continuous TTCN-3 (CTTCN-3) [12, 11], an extension of the standardized test specification language TTCN-3 [4]. Thus, we treat signals as streams and integrate the notion of signal properties with the notion of stream templates like they are already defined in CTTCN-3. Moreover, we provide a formal foundation for CTTCN-3 streams, for a selected set of signal properties and for their integration in CTTCN-3. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2008.