Artificial table testing dynamically adaptive systems

Freddy Munoz (1) , Benoit Baudry (1)

1 TRISKELL - Reliable and efficient component based software engineering

Dynamically Adaptive Systems (DAS) are systems that modify their behavior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment. Critical mission systems increasingly incorporate adaptation and response to the environment; examples include disaster relief and space exploration systems. These systems can be decomposed in two parts: the adaptation policy that specifies how the system must react according to the environmental changes and the set of possible variants to reconfigure the system. A major challenge for testing these systems is the combinatorial explosions of variants and envi-ronment conditions to which the system must react. In this paper we focus on testing the adaption policy and propose a strategy for the selection of envi-ronmental variations that can reveal faults in the policy. Artificial Shaking Table Testing (ASTT) is a strategy inspired by shaking table testing (STT), a technique widely used in civil engineering to evaluate building's structural re-sistance to seismic events. ASTT makes use of artificial earthquakes that simu-late violent changes in the environmental conditions and stresses the system adaptation capability. We model the generation of artificial earthquakes as a search problem in which the goal is to optimize different types of envi-ronmental variations.

Mots clés: Testing of dynamically adaptive systems; Artificial shaking table testing; Adaptation policy testing; Search based testing

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Freddy Munoz, Benoit Baudry. Artificial table testing dynamically adaptive systems. [Research Report] RR-6866, INRIA. 2009, pp.29. ⟨inria-00365874⟩