A Guided Method for Testing Timed Input Output Automata

Real-time systems are those systems whose behaviors are time dependent. Reliability is one of the characteristics of such systems and testing is one of the techniques that can be used to ensure reliable real-time systems. This paper presents a method for testing real-time systems specified by Timed Input Output Automata (TIOA). Our method is based on the concept of test purposes. The use of test purposes helps reduce the number of test cases generated since an exhaustive testing of a TIOA causes the well-known state explosion problem. The approach we present in this paper consists of three main steps. First, a synchronous product of the specification and test purpose is computed. Then, a sub-automaton (called Grid Automata) representing a subset of the state space of this product is derived. Finally, test cases are generated from the resulting grid automata. The test cases generated by our method are executable and can easily be represented in TTCN (Tabular Tree Combined Notation).