Test Specification and Test Methodology for Embedded Systems in Automobiles (TEMEA)

Despite the past few years’ intensive efforts of automobile manufacturers and their suppliers to enhance the quality assurance of their products, the problems of testing systems that, like automobiles, steadily increase in complexity and interconnectedness are still not solved. The variety of proprietary test systems and solutions do not allow an integrated definition, transfer, re-use and execution of tests for automobile manufacturers, suppliers and test equipment manufacturers. In contrast to the automotive industry, the telecommunication industry uses an integrated, manufacturer independent and standardized test technology: the Test and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3). The advantages of this technology have already been recognized by the automotive industry and therefore, AUTOSAR and MOST decided to use TTCN-3 for the definition of functional tests. However, the components of automobiles do not only have functional requirements. In addition to functional input-output behaviour, also continuous data streams and real-time behaviour have to be tested. The current version of TTCN-3 has only limited capabilities for testing such non-functional properties. To overcome these limitations, a consortium from industry and academia started the research project "TEst specification and test Methodology for Embedded systems in Automobiles" (TEMEA). TEMEA is targeted on developing a TTCN-3-based test specification and test implementation methodology for embedded systems in automobiles. The project will develop solutions to test continuous data streams and real-time behaviour with TTCN-3 and also investigate software engineering related issues like quality assessment and quality improvement of large test specifications.