Temporal Property-Based Testing of a Timed C Compiler using Time-Flow Graph Semantics
Saranya Natarajan, David Broman · 2020
The correctness of a real-time system depends both on it being logically sound and temporally correct. To guarantee temporal correctness, the development of such systems includes: (i) developing a model, (ii) formally verifying the model, and (iii) implementing the verified model using a programming language. The temporal correctness then depends on correctly implementing the model using a real-time programming language and compiling it to a hardware platform. Although the timing semantics of many real-time programming languages are well defined, there is no guarantee that the timing semantics of such programs are correctly translated by the compiler. In this paper, we propose a new method for temporal property-based testing. The general method is implemented and evaluated on the Timed C real-time programming language. We formalize the temporal core semantics of Timed C and then use this formalization to specify the properties that are tested by the new property-based testing tool. More specifically, the tool consist of two parts: (i) a generator that randomly generates Timed C programs, and (ii) a property checker that checks whether the language's timing semantics are correctly captured in its execution. We evaluate the method and tool on an embedded Raspberry Pi platform.