Statistical Testing of IEC 61499 Compliant Software Components

Abstract The standard IEC 61499 ushered in the use of Object-Oriented (OO) paradigm and Model Driven Development (MDD) in the realm of industrial automation. Consequently, it paved the way for easier integration of off-the-shelf and vendor specific or legacy software components in the applications. The standard provides a means for specifying implementation or hardware independent software modules which quite obviously would undergo innumerable reuses. Therefore, it is quite important to ensure that these modules as well as its implementations fulfill the requirements, especially the safety-critical ones. This necessitates that on one hand, the requirements are specified formally and on the other hand an exhaustive verification is performed. Often exhaustive verification of the requirements appears to be costly and a hasty and random choice of properties leaves out the critical an essential ones. To combat these challenges, this article presents a means for specifying functional requirements formally and a technique to produce black-box test-cases on the basis of these specifications. The specification can also be used to prudently and effectively choose test-cases when exhaustive testing appears to be improbable.