Simulated Time for Testing Railway Interlockings with TTCN-3

Abstract. 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 TTCN3. 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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: FATES
• Authors: Stefan Blom, Natalia Ioustinova, Jaco van de Pol, Axel Rennoch, Natalia Sidorova
• Keywords: Control Systems, FATES 2005, Railway Control, Simulated Time, Software Engineering