Defining a formal semantics for real-time test specification with TTCN-3

Real-time software is usually used in circumstances where safety is important and the margin for errors is narrow. These kinds of systems have applicability in a broad band of domains as: automotive, avionics, air traffic control, nuclear power stations, industrial control, etc. As the name denotes, the main feature of "real-time" applications is the criticality of their timeliness. Guaranteeing certain timeliness requires appropriate testing. As manual testing is burdensome and error prone, automated testing techniques are required. Although the importance of having a standard environment for automatic testing is high, the technologies in this area are not sufficiently developed. This paper reviews the standardized test description language "Testing and Test Control Notation version 3 (TTCN-3)" as a mean for real-time testing and proposes extensions to enable real-time testing with TTCN-3. The aim is to provide a complete testing solution for automatic functional and real-time testing, built around this already standardized testing language. The solution includes an environment for designing and running the tests written in the extended language. As a proof of concept, test examples, designed using the enhanced TTCN-3, are mapped to real-time platform implementations and the timeliness of each implementation is analyzed.