Incremental Symbolic Conformance Testing from UML MARTE Sequence Diagrams: Railway Use Case

When component-based systems are large and complex, one faces systems of systems, where interactions are mostly data-information flows. Examples include transport systems. A major issue in the production of such systems is the so-called emergent behaviors. These behaviors are more likely to appear within a bottom-up approach, where components are first produced and then gathered together to form the targeted system. The alternative approach is a top-down one: the system is specified as a whole in an abstract manner, and then individual components are built in away that their assemblage satisfies the system requirements. Therefore, by construction, emergence is better mastered because the system behaviors are specified a priori. In the scope of a top-down approach, we present an incremental testing framework, where the system requirements, involving timing constraints, are specified operationally as UML MARTE sequence diagrams. We use symbolic techniques to analyze the requirements and deduce unitary test cases for components integrating the system. We apply our approach on a railway use case.