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Zhou, J., Hänninen, K., Lundqvist, K., Lu, Y., Provenzano, L. & Forsberg, K. (2015). An Environment-Driven Ontological Approach to Requirements Elicitation for Safety-Critical Systems. In: 23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference RE'15: . Paper presented at 23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference RE'15, 24-28 Aug 2015, Ottawa, Canada (pp. 247-251).
Open this publication in new window or tab >>An Environment-Driven Ontological Approach to Requirements Elicitation for Safety-Critical Systems
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2015 (English)In: 23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference RE'15, 2015, p. 247-251Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The environment, where a safety critical system (SCS) operates, is an important source from which safety requirements of the SCS can originate. By treating the system under construction as a black box, the environment is typically documented as a number of assumptions, based on which a set of environmental safety requirements will be elicited. However, it is not a trivial task in practice to capture the environmental assumptions to elicit safety requirements. The lack of certain assumptions or too strict assumptions will either result in incomplete environmental safety requirements or waste many efforts on eliciting incorrect requirements. Moreover, the variety of operating environment for an SCS will further complicate the task, since the captured assumptions are at risk of invalidity, and consequently the elicited requirements need to be revisited to ensure safety has not been compromised by the change. This short paper presents an on-going work aiming to 1) systematically organize the knowledge of system operating environment and, 2) facilitate the elicitation of environmental safety requirements. We propose an ontological approach to achieve the objectives. In particular, we utilize conceptual ontologies to organize the environment knowledge in terms of relevant environment concepts, relations among them and axioms. Environmental assumptions are captured by instantiating the environment ontology. An ontological reasoning mechanism is also provided to support elicitation of safety requirements from the captured assumptions.

National Category
Computer Systems
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-29228 (URN)10.1109/RE.2015.7320431 (DOI)000380435800032 ()2-s2.0-84962432597 (Scopus ID)9781467369053 (ISBN)
Conference
23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference RE'15, 24-28 Aug 2015, Ottawa, Canada
Projects
SYNOPSIS - Safety Analysis for Predictable Software Intensive Systems
Available from: 2015-10-06 Created: 2015-09-29 Last updated: 2022-11-08Bibliographically approved
Zhou, J., Lu, Y. & Lundqvist, K. (2014). A TASM-based requirements validation approach for safety-critical embedded systems. In: 19th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Ada-Europe 2014: . Paper presented at 19th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Ada-Europe 2014 (pp. 43-57).
Open this publication in new window or tab >>A TASM-based requirements validation approach for safety-critical embedded systems
2014 (English)In: 19th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Ada-Europe 2014, 2014, p. 43-57Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Requirements validation is an essential activity to carry out in the system development life cycle, and it confirms the completeness and consistency of requirements through various levels. Model-based formal methods can provide a cost-effective solution to requirements validation in a wide range of domains such as safety-critical applications. In this paper, we extend a formal language Timed Abstract State Machine (TASM) with two newly defined constructs Event and Observer, and propose a novel requirements validation approach based on the extended TASM. Specifically, our approach can: 1) model both functional and non-functional (e.g. timing and resource consumption) requirements of the system at different levels and, 2) perform requirements validation by utilizing our developed toolset and a model checker. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach in real world usage through an industrial case study of a Brake-by-Wire system.

Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ISSN 0302-9743 ; 8454
National Category
Computer Engineering
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-25695 (URN)10.1007/978-3-319-08311-7_5 (DOI)000360100800005 ()2-s2.0-84903577705 (Scopus ID)9783319083100 (ISBN)
Conference
19th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Ada-Europe 2014
Available from: 2014-07-21 Created: 2014-07-18 Last updated: 2018-02-23Bibliographically approved
Zhou, J., Lu, Y. & Lundqvist, K. (2013). A Context-based Information Retrieval Technique for Recovering Use-Case-to-Source-Code Trace Links in Embedded Software Systems. In: : . Paper presented at 39th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA 2013), Santander, Spain September 4-6, 2013 (pp. 252-259).
Open this publication in new window or tab >>A Context-based Information Retrieval Technique for Recovering Use-Case-to-Source-Code Trace Links in Embedded Software Systems
2013 (English)Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Post-requirements traceability is the ability to relate requirements (e.g., use cases) forward to corresponding design documents, source code and test cases by establishing trace links. This ability is becoming ever more crucial within embedded systems development, as a critical activity of testing, verification, validation and certification. However, semi-automatically or fullyautomatically generating accurate trace links remains an open research challenge, especially for legacy systems. Vector Space Model (VSM), a notably known Information Retrieval (IR) technique aims to remedy this situation. However, VSMÂ’s lowaccuracy level in practice is a limitation. The contribution of this paper is an improved VSM-based post-requirements traceability recovery approach using a novel context analysis. Specifically, the analysis method can better utilize context information extracted from use cases to discover relevant source code files. Our approach is evaluated by using three different embedded applications in the domains of industrial automation, automotive and mobile. The evaluation shows that our new approach can achieve better accuracy than VSM, in terms of higher values of three main IR metrics, i.e., recall, precision, and mean average precision, when it handles embedded software applications.

National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-21408 (URN)10.1109/SEAA.2013.30 (DOI)2-s2.0-84889002506 (Scopus ID)
Conference
39th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA 2013), Santander, Spain September 4-6, 2013
Available from: 2013-09-11 Created: 2013-09-11 Last updated: 2014-09-05Bibliographically approved
Zhou, J., Lu, Y. & Lundqvist, K. (2013). An Improved VSM-based Post-Requirements Traceability Recovery Approach Using Context Analysis. Västerås: Mälardalen Real-Time Research Centre, Mälardalen University
Open this publication in new window or tab >>An Improved VSM-based Post-Requirements Traceability Recovery Approach Using Context Analysis
2013 (English)Report (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Automatically generating traceability links between software development artifacts existing throughout systems development life cycle, is becoming ever more important for requirements traceability. It remains an open software engineering challenge, especially for legacy systems, when the demand for minimizing human intervention is considered. The Vector Space Model (VSM), a notably known information retrieval technique, attempts to remedy the situation by reducing the required manual effort. One limitation of VSM is its low-level performance in practice, which can be improved by involving human intervention in the requirements traceability process earlier. The contribution of this paper is to present an improved VSM-based post/requirements traceability recovery approach by using a novel context analysis. This is done by firstly removing redundant information in the search space of the artifacts wrt a requirement, and then using both requirement and context queries to refine the results given by the standard VSM. In this way, the subsequent artifacts from the source requirement are more likely to be retrieved in the recovery process. Our approach is evaluated by using two chosen datasets (i.e., eTour and iTrust), of which results show that the proposed approach can achieve better performance in terms of discovering more true trace links and obtaining higher quality lists of traceability links than the standard VSM.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Västerås: Mälardalen Real-Time Research Centre, Mälardalen University, 2013
Series
MRTC report, ISSN 1404-3041
National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-21311 (URN)MDH-MRTC-273/2013-1-SE (ISRN)
Available from: 2013-09-20 Created: 2013-09-11 Last updated: 2014-01-10Bibliographically approved
Lu, Y., Nolte, T., Bate, I. & Cucu-Grosjean, L. (2012). A statistical response-time analysis of real-time embedded systems. In: Proceedings - Real-Time Systems Symposium, 2012: . Paper presented at 2012 IEEE 33rd Real-Time Systems Symposium, RTSS 2012; San Juan; Puerto Rico; 5 December 2012 through 7 December 2012 (pp. 351-362).
Open this publication in new window or tab >>A statistical response-time analysis of real-time embedded systems
2012 (English)In: Proceedings - Real-Time Systems Symposium, 2012, 2012, p. 351-362Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Real-time embedded systems are becoming ever more complex. We are reaching the stage where even if static Response-Time Analysis (RTA) was feasible from a cost and technical perspective, the results of such an analysis are overly pessimistic. This makes them less useful to the practitioner. In addition, the temporal validation and verification of such systems in some applications, e.g., aeronautics, requires the probability of obtaining a worst-case response time larger than a given value in order to support dependable system functions. All these facts advocate moving toward statistical RTA, which instead of calculating absolute worst-case timing guarantees, computes a probabilistic worst-case response time estimate. The contribution of this paper is to present and evaluate such a statistical RTA technique which uses a black box view of the systems under analysis, by not requiring estimates of parameters such as worst-case execution times of tasks. Furthermore, our analysis is applicable to real systems that are complex, e.g., from a task dependencies perspective.

National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-23843 (URN)10.1109/RTSS.2012.85 (DOI)000317284200032 ()2-s2.0-84874326391 (Scopus ID)9780769548692 (ISBN)
Conference
2012 IEEE 33rd Real-Time Systems Symposium, RTSS 2012; San Juan; Puerto Rico; 5 December 2012 through 7 December 2012
Available from: 2013-12-27 Created: 2013-12-19 Last updated: 2014-02-07Bibliographically approved
Lu, Y. & Nolte, T. (2012). An Evaluation Framework for Complex Industrial Real-Time Embedded Systems. Västerås: Mälardalen Real-Time Research Centre (MRTC), Mälardalen University
Open this publication in new window or tab >>An Evaluation Framework for Complex Industrial Real-Time Embedded Systems
2012 (English)Report (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In this technical report, we introduce an evaluation framework which are centering around four base models, inspired by an industrial robotic control application. Specifically, such evaluation models are quite complicated from a task execution and temporal dependencies perspective, making difficult to perform the corresponding timing analysis.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Västerås: Mälardalen Real-Time Research Centre (MRTC), Mälardalen University, 2012
National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-17231 (URN)
Available from: 2012-12-20 Created: 2012-12-20 Last updated: 2013-12-03Bibliographically approved
Lu, Y. (2012). Pragmatic Approaches for Timing Analysis of Real-Time Embedded Systems. (Doctoral dissertation). Västerås: Mälardalen University
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Pragmatic Approaches for Timing Analysis of Real-Time Embedded Systems
2012 (English)Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Many industrial real-time embedded systems are very large, flexible and highly configurable software systems. Such systems are becoming ever more complex, and we are reaching the stage in which even if existing timing analysis was feasible from a cost and technical perspective, the analysis results are overly pessimistic, making them less useful to practitioners. When combined with the fact that most existing real-time embedded systems tend to be probabilistic in nature due to high complexity featured by advanced hardware and more flexible and/or adaptive software applications, this advocates moving toward pragmatic timing analysis, which is not specifically limited by constrains related to intricate task execution and temporal dependencies in systems. In this thesis, we address this challenge, and we present two pragmatic timing analysis techniques for real-time embedded systems.

The first contribution is a simulation-based analysis using two simple yet novel search algorithms of meta-heuristic type, i.e., a form of genetic algorithms and hill-climbing with random restarts, yielding substantially better results, comparing traditional Monte Carlo simulation-based analysis methods.

As the second contribution, we discuss one major issue when using simulation-based methods for timing analysis of real-time embedded systems, i.e., model validity, which determines whether a simulation model is an accurate representation of the target system at the certain level of satisfaction, from a task response time and execution time perspective.

The third contribution is a statistical timing analysis, which, unlike the traditional timing analysis, does not require worst-case execution times of tasks as inputs, and computes a probabilistic task worst-case response time estimate pertaining to a configurable task reliability requirement.

In addition, a number of tools have been implemented and used for the evaluation of our research results. Our evaluations, using different simulation models depicting fictive but representative industrial control applications, have shown a clear indication that our new timing analysis techniques have the potential to be both applicable and useful in practice, as well as being complementary to software testing focusing on timing properties of real-time embedded systems that are used in various domains of industrial automation, aerospace and defense, automotive telematics, etc.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Västerås: Mälardalen University, 2012
Series
Mälardalen University Press Dissertations, ISSN 1651-4238 ; 128
National Category
Computer Sciences
Research subject
Computer Science
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-14628 (URN)978-91-7485-074-1 (ISBN)
Public defence
2012-06-18, Kappa, Mälardalens högskola, Västerås, 13:15 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Funder
Swedish Research Council
Available from: 2012-05-21 Created: 2012-05-21 Last updated: 2018-01-12Bibliographically approved
Lu, Y., Nolte, T., Bate, I. & Cucu-Grosjean, L. (2011). A New Way about using Statistical Analysis of Worst-Case Execution Times. Paper presented at Work-in-Progress (WiP) Session of the 23rd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2011). ACM SIGBED Review, 8(3), 11-14
Open this publication in new window or tab >>A New Way about using Statistical Analysis of Worst-Case Execution Times
2011 (English)In: ACM SIGBED Review, ISSN 1551-3688, Vol. 8, no 3, p. 11-14Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

In this paper, we revisit the problem of using Extreme Value Theory (EVT) in the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis of the programs running on a single processor. Our proposed statistical WCET analysis method consists of a novel sampling mechanism tackling with some problems that hindered the application of using EVT in the context, and a statistical inference about computation of a WCET estimate of the target program. To be specific, the presented sampling mechanism takes analysis samples from the target program based around end-to-end measurements. Next, the statistical inference using EVT together with other statistical techniques, analyzes such timing traces which contain the execution time data of the program, to compute a WCET estimate with a certain predictable probability of being exceeded.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2011
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-13545 (URN)10.1145/2038617.2038619 (DOI)
Conference
Work-in-Progress (WiP) Session of the 23rd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2011)
Available from: 2011-12-15 Created: 2011-12-15 Last updated: 2018-01-12Bibliographically approved
Lu, Y., Kraft, J., Nolte, T. & Bate, I. (2011). A statistical approach to simulation model validation in response-time analysis of complex real-time embedded systems. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2011: . Paper presented at 26th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2011, 21 March 2011 through 24 March 2011, TaiChung (pp. 711-716).
Open this publication in new window or tab >>A statistical approach to simulation model validation in response-time analysis of complex real-time embedded systems
2011 (English)In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2011, 2011, p. 711-716Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

As simulation-based analysis methods make few restrictions on the system design and scale to very large and complex systems, they are widely used in, e.g., timing analysis of complex real-time embedded systems (CRTES) in industrial circles. However, before such methods are used, the analysis simulation models have to be validated in order to assess if they represent the actual system or not, which also matters to the confidence in the simulation results. This paper presents a statistical approach to validation of temporal simulation models extracted from CRTES, by introducing existing mature statistical hypothesis tests to the context. Moreover, our evaluation using simulation models depicting a fictive but representative industrial robotic control system indicates that the proposed method can successfully identify temporal differences between different simulation models, hence it has the potential to be considered as an effective simulation model validation technique. © 2011 ACM.

Series
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
Keywords
complex realtime embedded systems, non-parametric statistical hypothesis testing, response time, simulation model validation, two-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test, Actual system, Industrial robotics, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Non-parametric, Real-time embedded systems, Response-time analysis, Simulation model, Simulation result, Simulation-based analysis, Statistical approach, Statistical hypothesis test, Temporal differences, Temporal simulation, Timing Analysis, Embedded systems, Real time systems, Robotics, Statistical tests, Systems analysis, Computer simulation
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-16058 (URN)10.1145/1982185.1982341 (DOI)2-s2.0-79959289106 (Scopus ID)9781450301138 (ISBN)
Conference
26th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2011, 21 March 2011 through 24 March 2011, TaiChung
Note

Sponsors: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP); Tunghai University; Taiwan Ministry of Education; Taiwan Bureau of Foreign Trade; Taiwan National Science Council (NSC)

Available from: 2012-10-29 Created: 2012-10-29 Last updated: 2018-01-12Bibliographically approved
Lu, Y., Nolte, T., Bate, I. & Cucu-Grosjean, L. (2011). A statistical response-time analysis of complex real-time embedded systems by using timing traces. In: SIES 2011 - 6th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems, Conference Proceedings: . Paper presented at 6th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems, SIES 2011; Västerås; Sweden; 15 June 2011 through 17 June 2011 (pp. 43-46).
Open this publication in new window or tab >>A statistical response-time analysis of complex real-time embedded systems by using timing traces
2011 (English)In: SIES 2011 - 6th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems, Conference Proceedings, 2011, p. 43-46Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Real-time embedded systems are becoming ever more complex, and we are reaching the stage where even if static Response-Time Analysis (RTA) was feasible from a cost and technical perspective, the results are overly pessimistic making them less useful to the practitioner. When combined with the fact that most timing analysis tends to be statistical in nature, this suggests there should be a move towardstatistical RTA. However, to make such analysis useful, it is imperative that we have evidence that the statistical RTA and the information analyzed is sufficiently accurate. In this paper we present and validatea technique for statistical RTA that can cope with systems that are complex from both a size and tasks' dependencies perspective. This claim is backed up by our evaluation using information from realindustrial control systems.

National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-23817 (URN)10.1109/SIES.2011.5953676 (DOI)2-s2.0-80051974229 (Scopus ID)9781612848204 (ISBN)
Conference
6th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems, SIES 2011; Västerås; Sweden; 15 June 2011 through 17 June 2011
Available from: 2013-12-27 Created: 2013-12-19 Last updated: 2014-02-13Bibliographically approved
Organisations
Identifiers
ORCID iD: ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0002-7366-7186

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