Abstract This paper proposes a new methodology for early validation of high-level requirements on cyber-physical systems with the aim of improving their quality and, thus, lowering chances of specification errors propagating into later stages of development where it is much more expensive to fix them. The paper presents a transformation of a real-world requirements specification of a medical device—the Patient-Controlled Analgesia (PCA) Pump—into an Event Calculus model that is then evaluated using Answer Set Programming and the s(CASP) system. The evaluation under s(CASP) allowed deductive as well as abductive reasoning about the specified functionality of the PCA pump on the conceptual level with minimal implementation or design dependent influences and led to fully automatically detected nuanced violations of critical safety properties. Further, the paper discusses scalability and non-termination challenges that had to be faced in the evaluation and techniques proposed to (partially) solve them. Finally, ideas for improving s(CASP) to overcome its evaluation limitations that still persist as well as to increase its expressiveness are presented.

This paper describes Unite, a new tool intended as an adapter for transforming non-interactive command-line analysis tools to OSLC-compliant web services. Unite aims to make such tools easier to adopt and more convenient to use by allowing them to be accessible, both locally and remotely, in a unified way and to be easily integrated into various development environments. Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) is an open standard for tool integration and was chosen for this task due to its robustness, extensibility, support of data from various domains, and its growing popularity. The work is motivated by allowing existing analysis tools to be more widely used with a strong emphasis on widening their industrial usage. We have implemented Unite and used it with multiple existing static as well as dynamic analysis and verification tools, and then successfully deployed it internationally in the industry to automate verification tasks for development teams in Honeywell. We discuss Honeywell's experience with using Unite and with OSLC in general. Moreover, we also provide the Unite Client (UniC) for Eclipse to allow users to easily run various analysis tools directly from the Eclipse IDE.

There is an ever-increasing complexity of the systems we engineer in modern society, which includes facing the convergence of the embedded world and the open world. This complexity creates increasing difficulty with providing assurance for factors including safety, security and performance. In such a context, the AQUAS project investigates the challenges arising from the inter-dependence of safety, security and performance of systems and aims at efficient solutions for the entire product life-cycle. The project builds on knowledge of partners gained in current or former EU projects and will demonstrate the newly developed methods and techniques for co-engineering across use cases spanning Space, Medicine, Transport and Industrial Control.

Summary Testing of concurrent programmes is difficult since the scheduling nondeterminism requires one to test a huge number of different thread interleavings. Moreover, repeated test executions that are performed in the same environment will typically examine similar interleavings only. One possible way how to deal with this problem is to use the noise injection approach, which influences the scheduling by injecting various kinds of noise (delays, context switches, etc) into the common thread behaviour. However, for noise injection to be efficient, one has to choose suitable noise injection heuristics from among the many existing ones as well as to suitably choose values of their various parameters, which is not easy. In this paper, we propose a novel way how to deal with the problem of choosing suitable noise injection heuristics and suitable values of their parameters (as well as suitable values of parameters of the programmes being tested themselves). Here, by suitable, we mean such settings that maximize chances of meeting a given testing goal (such as, eg, maximizing coverage of rare behaviours and thus maximizing chances to find rarely occurring concurrency‐related bugs). Our approach is, in particular, based on using data mining in the context of noise‐based testing to get more insight about the importance of the different heuristics in a particular testing context as well as to improve fully automated noise‐based testing (in combination with both random as well as genetically optimized noise setting).

Summary Testing of concurrent software written in programming languages like Java and C/C++ is a highly challenging task owing to the many possible interactions among threads. A simple, cheap, and effective approach that addresses this challenge is testing with noise injection , which influences the scheduling so that different interleavings of concurrent actions are witnessed. In this paper, multiple results achieved recently in the area of noise‐injection‐based testing by the authors are presented in a unified and extended way. In particular, various concurrency coverage metrics are presented first. Then, multiple heuristics for solving the noise placement problem (i.e. where and when to generate noise) as well as the noise seeding problem (i.e. how to generate the noise) are introduced and experimentally evaluated. In addition, several new heuristics are proposed and included into the evaluation too. Recommendations on how to set up noise‐based testing for particular scenarios are then given. Finally, a novel use of the genetic algorithm for finding suitable combinations of the many parameters of tests and noise techniques is presented. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.