A Visual Formalism for Interacting Systems
This work addresses testing challenges for engineers in domains like embedded systems and Systems of Systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Petri net and model-based testing concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of unintended interactions in complex interacting systems by proposing Swim Lane Event-Driven Petri Nets as a visual formalism for Model-Based Testing, though it is limited to offline testing due to a lack of available tools.
Interacting systems are increasingly common. Many examples pervade our everyday lives: automobiles, aircraft, defense systems, telephone switching systems, financial systems, national governments, and so on. Closer to computer science, embedded systems and Systems of Systems are further examples of interacting systems. Common to all of these is that some "whole" is made up of constituent parts, and these parts interact with each other. By design, these interactions are intentional, but it is the unintended interactions that are problematic. The Systems of Systems literature uses the terms "constituent systems" and "constituents" to refer to systems that interact with each other. That practice is followed here. This paper presents a visual formalism, Swim Lane Event-Driven Petri Nets, that is proposed as a basis for Model-Based Testing (MBT) of interacting systems. In the absence of available tools, this model can only support the offline form of Model-Based Testing.