Simulated time for testing railway interlockings with TTCN-3

Railway control systems are timed and safety-critical. Testing these systems is a key issue. Prior to system testing, the software of a railway control system is tested separately from the hardware. Here we show that real time and scaled time semantics are inefficient for testing this software. We provide a time semantics with simulated time and show that this semantics is more suitable for testing of software of railway control systems. TTCN-3 is a standardized language for specifying and executing test suites. It supports real time and scaled time but not simulated time. We provide a solution that allows simulated time testing with TTCN-3. Our solution is based on Dijkstra's distributed termination detection algorithm. The solution is implemented and can be reused for simulated time testing of other systems with similar characteristics.