Interactive Real-Time Embedded Systems Education Infused with Applied Internet Telephony

The transition from traditional circuit-switched phone systems to modern packet-based Internet telephony networks demands tools to support Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) development. In this paper, we introduce the XinuPhone, an integrated hardware/software approach for educating users about VoIP technology on a real-time embedded platform. We propose modular course topics for design-oriented, hands-on laboratory exercises: filter design, timing, serial communications, interrupts and resource budgeting, network transmission, and system benchmarking. Our open-source software platform encourages development and testing of new CODECs alongside existing standards, unlike similar commercial solutions. Furthermore, the supporting hardware features inexpensive, readily available components designed specifically for educational and research users on a limited budget. The XinuPhone is especially good for experimenting with design trade-offs as well as interactions between real-time software and hardware components

FORTEST: Formal methods and testing

Formal methods have traditionally been used for specification and development of software. However there are potential benefits for the testing stage as well. The panel session associated with this paper explores the usefulness or otherwise of formal methods in various contexts for improving software testing. A number of different possibilities for the use of formal methods are explored and questions raised. The contributors are all members of the UK FORTEST Network on formal methods and testing. Although the authors generally believe that formal methods are useful in aiding the testing process, this paper is intended to provoke discussion. Dissenters are encouraged to put their views to the panel or individually to the authors

Component Based System Framework for Dynamic B2B Interaction

Business-to-business (B2B) collaboration is becoming a pivotal way to bring today's enterprises to success in the dynamically changing, e-business environment. Though many business-to-business protocols are developed to support B2B interaction, none are generally accepted. A B2B system should support different B2B protocols dynamically to enable interaction between diverse enterprises. This paper proposes a framework for dynamic B2B interaction. A B2B transaction is divided into the interaction part and business implementation part to support flexible interaction. A component based system framework is proposed,to support the B2B transaction execution. To support. dynamic B2B services, dynamic component composition is required. Service and component notions are combined into a composable service component. The composition architecture is also presented

Expanding an extended finite state machine to aid testability

The problem of testing from an extended finite state machine (EFSM) is complicated by the presence of infeasible paths. This paper considers the problem of expanding an EFSM in order to bypass the infeasible path problem. The approach is developed for the specification language SDL but, in order to aid generality, the rewriting process is broken down into two phases: producing a normal form EFSM (NF-EFSM) from an SDL specification and then expanding this NF-EFSM

Interaction-driven definition of e-business processes

Business-to-business interaction (B2Bi) is the next step for corporate IT [1]. Business relationships become increasingly dynamic, and new requirements emerge for data and process management. Standardisation initiatives are successfully targeting business ontology [4]. Still, business agility mainly depends on the flexibility of the business processes of a company. In the B2B space, traditional approaches to process modelling and management are inadequate. Today more than ever, traditional workflow management is crucial for the internal effectiveness of a company. Internal efficiency is a prerequisite for external agility. From both a technical and a business perspective, internal workflow management relies on specific assumptions in terms of resources involved in the process, as well as the process itself [2]. Level of control, availability, reliability, and cost stability are parameters that traditional process models and technology can almost take for granted. A single authority ruling on the process definition and the total control over process execution are also basic concepts for internal workflows. From a business perspective, a big upfront investment is put in the complete definition of process specifications. A different conceptual framework is required for the definition and management of e-business processes [3, 5]. The intrinsic capability to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements becomes crucial. The line of research explored in this paper derives from an approach to process modelling and management that explicitly targets the peculiarities and dynamics of B2Bi. In the model we propose, the upfront specification of the interaction logic of a company can be limited to partially specified processes and basic interaction rules. Specific information is then gathered from the observation of actual instances of business interaction, and used to refine and extend the initial model. In addition to the enforcement of explicit business requirement, the goal is to capture and leverage implicit operational knowledge. In the following sections, we present an overview of the methodology we are currently experimenting with for the inference of complex processes from business interaction flows. For our initial experiments, we focus on business messages compliant with the RosettaNet standard [4]

Precise propagation of fault-failure correlations in program flow graphs

Statistical fault localization techniques find suspicious faulty program entities in programs by comparing passed and failed executions. Existing studies show that such techniques can be promising in locating program faults. However, coincidental correctness and execution crashes may make program entities indistinguishable in the execution spectra under study, or cause inaccurate counting, thus severely affecting the precision of existing fault localization techniques. In this paper, we propose a BlockRank technique, which calculates, contrasts, and propagates the mean edge profiles between passed and failed executions to alleviate the impact of coincidental correctness. To address the issue of execution crashes, Block-Rank identifies suspicious basic blocks by modeling how each basic block contributes to failures by apportioning their fault relevance to surrounding basic blocks in terms of the rate of successful transition observed from passed and failed executions. BlockRank is empirically shown to be more effective than nine representative techniques on four real-life medium-sized programs. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versionProceedings of the 35th IEEE Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2011), Munich, Germany, 18-22 July 2011, p. 58-6

A Methodology for Structured Object-Oriented Elicitation and Analysis of Temporal Constraints in Hardware/Software Co-Analysis and Co-Design of Real-Time Systems

The hardware/software co-design of a high-quality real-time system relies heavily on the modeling of both the hardware and software components from three aspects: structures, functionalities, and constraints, especially the temporal constraints. However, there is not a systematic process for the elicitation and analysis of temporal constraints in hardware/software co-design. Furthermore, existing object-oriented methods provide no means for the explicit specification of system/component constraints in object models. This paper presents a systematic methodology for structured object-oriented analysis and specification of temporal constraints in hardware/software co-analysis and co-design using an extended High-Order Object-Oriented Modeling Technique (HOOMT). This methodology hierarchically elicits and analyzes the temporal constraints in hardware/software co-design based on the integration of the High-Order Object Model (HOOM) and Hierarchical Timed Automata (HTA). It helps to identify temporal constraints of hardware and software components as well as their interactions level by level. In addition, it helps trace the relationships among these constraints at multiple levels during the co-design of real-time systems. A case study from the hardware/software co-design of the simulated FACTS Power Transmission System is used to illustrate the feasibility and merits of this methodology

Reasoning About a Simulated Printer Case Investigation with Forensic Lucid

In this work we model the ACME (a fictitious company name) "printer case incident" and make its specification in Forensic Lucid, a Lucid- and intensional-logic-based programming language for cyberforensic analysis and event reconstruction specification. The printer case involves a dispute between two parties that was previously solved using the finite-state automata (FSA) approach, and is now re-done in a more usable way in Forensic Lucid. Our simulation is based on the said case modeling by encoding concepts like evidence and the related witness accounts as an evidential statement context in a Forensic Lucid program, which is an input to the transition function that models the possible deductions in the case. We then invoke the transition function (actually its reverse) with the evidential statement context to see if the evidence we encoded agrees with one's claims and then attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events that may explain the claim or disprove it.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 7 listings, TOC, index; this article closely relates to arXiv:0906.0049 and arXiv:0904.3789 but to remain stand-alone repeats some of the background and introductory content; abstract presented at HSC'09 and the full updated paper at ICDF2C'11. This is an updated/edited version after ICDF2C proceedings with more references and correction

An Instance-Based Structured Object Oriented Method for Co-Analysis/Co-Design of Concurrent Embedded Systems

The current object-oriented class-based approaches to hardware/software co-analysis/co-design of embedded systems are limited in their abilities to properly capture the structure of individual instances of hardware and software components and their interactions. This paper discusses a methodology to extend a structured objectoriented hardware/software co-design methodology based on the High Order Object-oriented Modeling Technique (HOOMT) to incorporate instance-based object and behavioral models. The instance-based structured object-oriented methodology will enable description of a system\u27s structure based on individual instances of hardware and software components and specification of the interactions among them. In addition, lattices are introduced to specify the concurrent behavior of hardware/software components in a concurrent embedded system. These additions further enhance the method\u27s capability of providing a precise set of specifications that can be understood easily by both hardware and software designers in co-analysis/codesign. The methodology has been applied to the specification of hardware and software of a simulated advanced power grid control system