Scientific publications

The ComMA language has been developed to specify interfaces of software components, including protocol state machines, time and data constraints, and constraints on relations between events of multiple interfaces. The language has been devised in close collaboration with an industrial partner where it has been used to model a large number of interfaces.

Model-based testing involves testing a system under test for conformance to a model that specifies its behaviour. An important aspect for model-based testing is the implementation relation that defines precisely when a system under test conforms to its model. The implementation relation ioco has often been used and studied in model-based testing when models are expressed as labelled transition systems, and there are tools implementing ioco-based test generation.

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are complex heterogeneous and distributed computing systems, typically integrating and interconnecting a large number of subsystems and containing a substantial number of hardware and software components. Producers of these distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (dCPS) face serious challenges with respect to designing the next generations of these machines and require proper support in making (early) design decisions to avoid expensive and time consuming oversights.

We present a Python library for trace analysis named PyContract. PyContract is a shallow internal DSL, in contrast to many trace analysis tools that implement external or deep internal DSLs. The library has been used in a project for analysis of logs from NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. We describe our design choices, explain the API via examples, and present an experiment comparing PyContract against other state-of-the-art tools from the research and industrial communities.

Software-intensive systems constantly evolve. To prevent software changes from unintentionally introducing costly system defects, it is important to understand their impact to reduce risk. However, it is in practice nearly impossible to foresee the full impact of software changes when dealing with huge industrial systems with many configurations and usage scenarios.