Practical ultra-reliability for abstract data types: Research Articles

The Term Redundancy Method (TRM) is a novel approach for obtaining ultra-reliable programs through specification-based testing. Current specification-based testing schemes need a prohibitively large number of test cases for estimating ultra-reliability. They assume the availability of an accurate program-usage distribution prior to testing, and they assume the availability of a test oracle. This paper shows how to obtain ultra-reliable abstract data types specified with equational specifications, with a practical number of test cases, without an accurate usage distribution, and without the usual test oracle. The effectiveness of the TRM in failure detection and recovery is demonstrated on the aircraft collision avoidance system TCAS. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.