Contract-Based Specification and Test Generation for Adaptive Systems

Control systems in railway, automotive or industrial robotic applications are generally tightly integrated into their environment to allow adapting to environmental changes. This paper proposes a contract-based specification and testing approach for adaptive systems based on the combination of a high-level scenario language (LSC variant) and an adaptive contract language (statechart extension). The scenario language supports high-level modeling constructs as well as configurable options for test generation. The adaptive contract language supports the flexible definition of scenario contract activation and deactivation based on environmental changes or interactions. Tests can be derived from adaptive contract descriptions using the combination of graph-traversal algorithms and integrated model checker back-ends. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated in the context of the Gamma framework.