From timed scenarios to SDL: specification, implementation and testing of real-time systems

Nowadays, software systems are increasingly involved in safety-critical systems such as patient monitoring systems and air traffic control systems. Moreover, we witness the rapid development and deployment of new applications such as multimedia systems. The behavior of these systems are time-dependent. To be simulated, validated and implemented, real-time systems must be specified in a Formal Description Technique (FDT). In this paper, we propose a methodology to specify, implement, and test real-time systems. A system is first specified as a set of timed scenarios. These scenarios are integrated (via the tool REST [1]) to obtain a set of Timed Finite State Machine (TFSM), a variant of Timed Automata [2]. The resulting TFSMs are translated into SDL. After being validated, the SDL specification is used to generate automatically a partial implementation which is completed by the user. This implementation must be tested to assess its conformance to its specification. Timed test cases used to achieve this goal are generated from the TFSMs derived using REST.

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