Practical Test and Verification of Component Behavioral Characteristics

While test and certification of current Naval systems based on federatedarchitectures is a well-understood process, existing methodologies willprove inadequate when applied to component-based distributed real-timesystems employing dynamic resource management in a heterogeneousenvironment. This inadequacy in testing and certification can be addressedby the development of testing methodologies that characterize component behaviorthrough specification of assertions on both functional and non-functionalbehaviors.We propose to investigate extension of the Assertion Definition Languagetool to provide verification of non-functional as well as functionalbehavioral characteristics of a component as the foundation of anassertion-based testing methodology. The existing ADL implementation alreadyhas many of the attributes necessary to satisfy a systematic functionalverification methodology. We will identify enhancements to the ADLspecification language and test generation capability to include metrics fornon-functional characteristics as part of the formal grammar that expressesthe assertion specification of an interface's behaviors. Targetedcharacteristics will focus on hard and soft real-time behaviors such asdeadline, latency, throughput, and jitter. This approach will be applicable to multiple system design patterns, is systematic, and provides a high degree of automation making the process auditable and repeatable.