Development and Application of a new Environment Simulation System for Test and Verification of Reactive Software Components

Starting with survey of current software process models, software quality, verification, validation, testing, and formal methods in software development, discrete event simulation in general and environment simulation in particular are covered and selected existing systems are compared. Environment simulation is a technique, where a reactive system is coupled with a simulation model of its environment to generate stimuli for testing this system. It is used when tests in the physical environment would be either not possible, too expensive, or too dangerous. A new environment simulation system, WATIS2, is presented, which is flexible and efficient enough for a general application in the development of control computers for automatic logistic systems. It has a layered architecture: in the application layer, parameterized simulation components are combined to environment simulation models, in the component layer, these components are constructed by separating control domain and spatial domain and modeling these component parts with statecharts (STATEMATE) and MODSIM respectively. These parts are then integrated in a cosimulation environment. The WATIS2 environment serves to construct 5 models, apply them, and assess its modeling efficiency and impacts on the software development, in this way showing the applicability of WATIS2.