Back-to-Back Testing of Self-organization Mechanisms
When developing SO mechanisms, mapping requirements to actual designs and implementations demands a lot of expertise. Among other things, it is important to define the right degree of freedom for the system that allows for self-organization. Back-to-back
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Abstract. When developing SO mechanisms, mapping requirements to actual designs and implementations demands a lot of expertise. Among other things, it is important to define the right degree of freedom for the system that allows for self-organization. Back-to-back testing supports this hard engineering task by an adequate testing method helping to reveal failures in this design and implementation procedure. Within this paper we propose a model-based approach for back-to-back testing. The approach is built on top of the S# framework and integrated into the Visual Studio development environment, enabling the creation of executable test models with comprehensive tooling support for model debugging. By applying the concepts to a self-organizing production cell, we show how it is used to fully automatically reveal faults of a SO mechanism. Keywords: Adaptive systems engineering · Software testing testing · Model-based testing
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Self-organization · Software Quality assurance · Back-to-back
Introduction
The increasing complexity of current software systems has led to an increase of autonomy of software components that are resilient, flexible, dependable, versatile, recoverable, customizable, and self-optimizing by adapting to changes that may occur in their environments [11]. Self-organization (SO) has become a keystone in the development of autonomous systems, allowing them to adapt their behavior and structure in order to fulfill their goals under ever-changing environmental conditions. Mechanisms of SO are built on top of the concepts of classical feedback loops (cf. [9,16]). Therefore, the environment and the components are sensed and controlled, using the feedback to adapt the behavior and/or structure of the components. Different architectural concepts were developed to engineer SO mechanisms, e.g., the MAPE Cycle [9] or the Observer/Controller Architecture [16]. As an important part of the development of SO mechanisms, testing needs to be integrated in order to achieve the required quality level of the system. c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved F. Wotawa et al. (Eds.): ICTSS 2016, LNCS 9976, pp. 18–35, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-47443-4 2
Back-to-Back Testing of Self-organization Mechanisms
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This paper presents a thorough approach for supporting the engineering of SO mechanisms by back-to-back (BtB) testing [19] of feedback loop-based self-organization mechanisms. In our experiences in developing SO mechanisms, mapping requirements to actual designs and implementations demands a lot of expertise. Among other things, it is important to allow the system the right degree of freedom to enable self-organization. Back-to-back testing supports this engineering task with an adequate testing method helping to reveal failures in this design and implementation procedure. In order to supply BtB testing for SO mechanisms, we are faced by the following challenges: 1. Supplying test oracles that are able to cop
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