A requirement driven testing method for multi-disciplinary system design

Abstract

In cyber-physical systems, the operations of various physical entities are controlled by computing cores. Therefore the design of these systems involves multi-disciplinary teams, for the development of the electronic devices and embedded firmware, but also for the design of the physical components (with mechanical, electrical, thermal, electromagnetic features). This intimate coupling of disparate elements makes correctness analysis very complex. Composite requirements have to be verified. In many application domains some of these requirements come from standardization documents, e.g., for systems that have to conform to IEC standards. One of the main challenges is to make the variety of experts coordinate towards the satisfaction of these requirements, in spite of the fact that they are accustomed to focusing on their domain-specific issues, with their specialized tools. The aim of the method proposed here is to provide a unified testing framework to enable the validation of cross-disciplinary requirements. Since we target a general-purpose solution, usable by all disciplines, the method is specified using an abstract modeling language, namely SysML.