Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Language descriptions have much information captured in plain (English) text, and even the formalised parts are often informally connected with the overall language definition. These imprecise descriptions are hardly usable to automatically generate language tool environments out of the language standard. SDL has already managed to define syntax and semantics in a quite formal way. Currently, this formality is connected by using different types of grammars. Meta-models, however, have proven to be a good way of expressing complex facts and relations. Moreover, there are tools and technologies available realising all language aspects based on completely formal and still easily understandable meta-model-based descriptions. This paper is about an experiment of combining all these existing techniques to create a definition of (a subset of) SDL. This allows to have immediate tool support for the language. This experiment includes the language aspects concrete syntax representation, static semantic constraints, and language behaviour. It turns out that this is almost possible.

Describing an application as a simple composition of services allows advanced features that exploit different platforms to be conceived and to be formalized at a high abstraction level. Several languages and formalisms have been proposed to this aim; UML diagrams are also used to this purpose. Starting from such an abstract description, still much work is needed to derive a working application, with a model-driven development process that needs to introduce and formalize many details. In this paper we report an experience in deriving an executable formal model from a high level specifications, originally given following a mainly architectural UML approach. The development process is illustrated on an automotive case study. A state of the art code generation tool is then applied to produce a prototype implementation of the analyzed system.

In this paper, we describe how Motorola has deployed model-driven engineering in product development, in particular for the development of highly reliable telecommunications systems, and outline the benefits obtained. Model-driven engineering has dramatically increased both the quality and the reliability of software developed in our organization, as well as the productivity of our software engineers. Our experience demonstrates that model-driven engineering significantly improves the development process for telecommunications systems. We discuss the elements we found most important for deployment of model-driven engineering in a large product development organization: An appropriate modeling language, a powerful domain-specific code generator, and a deployment support team.

Software metrics are an essential means to assess software quality. For the assessment of software quality, typically sets of complementing metrics are used since individual metrics cover only isolated quality aspects rather than a quality characteristic as a whole. The choice of the metrics within such metric sets, however, is non-trivial. Metrics may intuitively appear to be complementing, but they often are in fact non-orthogonal, i.e. the information they provide may overlap to some extent. In the past, such redundant metrics have been identified, for example, by statistical correlation methods. This paper presents, based on machine learning, a novel approach to minimise sets of metrics by identifying and removing metrics which have little effect on the overall quality assessment. To demonstrate the application of this approach, results from an experiment are provided. In this experiment, a set of metrics that is used to assess the analysability of test suites that are specified using the Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) is investigated.

While protocol conformance testing methodology is a well formalized field, radio testing methodology still relies on natural language specifications. This paper proposes an improvement on the quality of radio test specifications via the use of formal notation TTCN. This approach, and the fact that protocol and radio conformance testing share most of the underlying concepts, enables the use of a generic architecture for implementations of both types of testers, resulting in a reduction of the development efforts. This architecture has been validated with the implementation of radio test cases for the UMTS technology.

This paper describes a toolset for functional testing UML2.0 models by TTCN-3 test suites and its application within Motorola. The toolset incorporates support for part of the UML2.0 testing profile from which TTCN-3 can be generated. The toolset has been developed within Motorola for models developed using Telelogic Tau G2 and test suites using Telelogic Tester. The models are subsequently used for application code generation. The basic integration of the Telelogic Tau and Tester, called cosim , has novel features, such as the ability to service operations declared as external to the model within TTCN-3, and to control model timer operations within TTCN-3. Translating UML2.0 data structures, such as classes, signal definitions, port definitions, and constants into TTCN-3 is done by a tool called UMB. The paper deals with complexities in mapping Tau UML2.0 types and structuring into TTCN-3. To provide more rigorous test specification a tool supporting part of the UML2.0 Testing Profile has been developed which enables consistency of test specifications to be checked automatically and also the generation of executable TTCN-3 test suites for cosim . The toolset is being used by several different product groups within Motorola, and the paper reports some experience and findings, including areas where TTCN-3 can be extended.

According to the SDL semantics, input ports “may retain any number of input signals”, and therefore may grow without upper bound. While this is a convenient property on design level, it may lead to illegal behaviour on concrete hardware platforms when a queue overflow occurs, especially in the context of distributed embedded systems with severe storage constraints. In this paper, we present a straightforward extension of SDL in order to specify input port bounds formally. In our solution, bounds are associated with signals and input ports. We define both the concrete and abstract grammar and the formal dynamic semantics of the proposed SDL extension. We have implemented the extension in Cmicro, and illustrate our solution by examples from the Assisted Bicycle Trainer, a wireless sensor network.

The paper describes syntax, behavior and formal semantics of a new class of timed automata, which are tailored for modeling the behavior of real-time systems. A formal method for automatic generation of programs is developed around this model. The method starts from modeling the desired behavior of the system under design by means of a UML-based state machine with the ability to measure time, and ends up with a complete program written in one of the IEC 1131 languages. The translation process is done automatically, and the semantics of the resulting program is isomorphic to the semantics of the model.

The Use Case Map (UCM) notation enables the use of graphical scenarios to model grey-box views of a system’s operational requirements and behaviour, in context. The scenario traversal mechanism is the most popular UCM analysis technique but its current tool support in UCMNav is limited and hard to use, and the high coupling of its features makes it difficult to maintain and evolve. This paper presents major enhancements to the recent jUCMNav Eclipse plugin consisting of a new scenario traversal semantics accompanied by enhanced trace transformations to Message Sequence Charts. In addition, this paper identifies a set of semantic variation points which lay the groundwork for notational clarifications and user-defined semantic profiles.

A micro protocol is a ready-to-use, self-contained, distributed component that supports structuring of complex communication systems, and reuse of well proven elementary communication solutions. Micro protocol designs can be formally specified with SDL. For documentation purposes and effective reuse, these SDL designs are augmented by further description elements, for instance, typical scenarios capturing the micro protocol service and the interaction of micro protocol entities. In this paper, we show how these additional description elements can be generated from an augmented micro protocol design specification. We have devised a tool that creates a PDF file, containing the complete micro protocol description with graphical elements and a link to the SDL design specification. Our approach enhances the maintenance of micro protocol libraries, and supports the consistency of micro protocol description elements and SDL designs.