Testing Model-Processing Tools for Embedded Systems

Model-based development is increasingly becoming the method of choice for developing embedded systems for applications in automotive and aerospace industries. It relies on tool-suites consisting of a variety of model-processing tools like simulators, model-translators and code-generators. The correctness of these tools used in the development process is a key requirement for safety critical applications. This paper proposes a novel testing methodology for the rigorous verification of model processing tools. The proposed methodology takes as input the syntactic and semantic meta-model of a modeling language, expressed in the form of inference rules. Using a coverage criteria over this meta-model, it generates test-models, and test-inputs for these test-models. Apart from testing the syntactic aspects of the translation, our method aims at testing subtle semantic interactions of the modeling language that are potentially mistranslated by the model-processing tools. We illustrate the methodology with a simple prototypical process calculus. We also report on the experiments carried out with Stateflow, a variant of hierarchical state-machines implemented in the Matlab/Simulink tool-suite