ScenarioTools real-time play-out for test sequence validation in an automotive case study

Journal article, 2014

In many areas, such as automotive, healthcare, or production, we find softwareintensive systems with complex real-time requirements. To efficiently ensure the quality of these systems, engineers require automated tools for the validation of the requirements throughout the development. This, however, requires that the requirements are specified in an analyzable way. We propose modeling the specification using Modal Sequence Diagrams (MSDs), which express what a system may, must, or must not do in certain situations. MSDs can be executed via the play-out algorithm to investigate the behavior emerging from the interplay of multiple scenarios; we can also test if traces of the final product satisfy all scenarios. In this paper, we present the first tool supporting the play-out of MSDs with real-time constraints. As a case study, we modeled the requirements on gear shifts in an upcoming standard on vehicle testing and use our tool to validate externally generated gear shift sequences.