Defining a Formal Semantics for Real-Time Test Specification with TTCN-31

Real-time software is usually used in circumstances where safety is important and the margin for errors isnarrow. These kinds of systems have applicability in a broad band of domains as: automotive, avionics, airtraffic control, nuclear power stations, industrial control, etc. As the name denotes, the main feature of"real-time" applications is the criticality of their timeliness. Guaranteeing certain timeliness requiresappropriate testing. As manual testing is burdensome and error prone, automated testing techniques arerequired. Although the importance of having a standard environment for automatic testing is high, thetechnologies in this area are not sufficiently developed. This paper reviews the standardized testdescription language "Testing and Test Control Notation version 3 (TTCN-3)" as a mean for real-timetesting and proposes extensions to enable real-time testing with TTCN-3. The aim is to provide a completetesting solution for automatic functional and real-time testing, built around this already standardizedtesting language. The solution includes an environment for designing and running the tests written in theextended language. As a proof of concept, test examples, designed using the enhanced TTCN-3, are mappedto real-time platform implementations and the timeliness of each implementation is analyzed.