Runtime Conformance Checking of Mobile Agent Systems Using Executable Models
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Authors
Saifan, Ahmad
Date
2010-04-27T21:11:58Z
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
runtime monitoring , conformance testing , mobile agent , process algebra , mutation testing , Kiltera
Alternative Title
Abstract
Mobility occurs naturally in many distributed system applications such as telecommunications and electronic commerce. Mobility may reduce bandwidth consumption
and coupling and increase flexibility. However, it seems that relatively little work has
been done to support quality assurance techniques such as testing and verification of
mobile systems.
This thesis describes an approach for checking the conformance of a mobile, distributed application with respect to an executable model at runtime. The approach
is based on kiltera -- a novel, high-level language supporting the description and execution of models of concurrent, mobile, distributed, and timed computation. The
approach allows distributed, rather than centralized, monitoring. However, it makes
very few assumptions about the platform that the mobile agent system is implemented
in.
We have implemented our approach and validated it using four case studies. Two
of them are examples of mobile agent systems, the two others are implementations
of distributed algorithms. Our approach was able to detect seeded faults in the
implementations. To check the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach more
comprehensively a mutation-based evaluation framework has been implemented. In
this framework a set of a new mutation operators for mobile agent systems has been
identified in order to automatically generate and run a number of mutants programs
and then evaluate the ability of our approach to detect these mutants. We found that
our approach is very effective and efficient in killing the non-equivalent mutants.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-27 12:35:47.996
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