PlaTFoRm

The certification of safety-critical systems requires normal range and robustness tests that can be developed from high/low-level requirements (HLRs, LLRs). At the system level, manual derivation of these tests from HLRs is not possible (e.g. due to emergent behaviour), and current test case generation approaches cannot specifically test the robustness of the system. At the component level, automatic test case generation currently suffers from high computational complexity and is based on the time-consuming and error-prone manual derivation of LLRs and test assertions. Furthermore, relating low-level tests to system properties is not straightforward and hence it is difficult to claim appropriate certification credit.

PlaTFoRm will allow engineers to express HLRs in a formal yet intuitive language from which pre-/post-conditions can be automatically extracted. This will permit  heuristic test case generation at system and component level, reducing the computational effort. The results will be validated in an automotive and a medical technology case study.

fortiss is developing the following approaches as part of the sub-project “Requirements-based heuristic test case generation for safety-critical systems”:

• Framework for simulation-based robustness tests at system level, with which systemic, safety-relevant properties can be checked in early development phases. It supports the injection of software and hardware errors in order to trigger and thus test safety mechanisms.
• Automated heuristic test case generation: Based on system-specific heuristics that are derived from formal requirements, the test cases that are most likely to reveal potential errors in the integrated system (“worst-case scenarios”) can be identified as quickly as possible.
   

The project results are going to be evaluated in two case studies:

1. Automotive case study with the open-source models from the fortiss Mobility Lab, in which test cases are generated based on requirements from the UNECE R157 standard for automatic lane keeping systems (e.g. safety distance)
2. Industrial case study on safety-critical software in a medical device

Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) on the basis of a decision by the German Bundestag through the Central Innovation Programme for SMEs (ZIM) and Innovate UK in the frame of the 3rd Call for Proposals for Joint Research and Development (R&D) Projects between Germany and the United Kingdom.

01.12.2024 – 31.07.2027