Validation of smart city applications: a fault-based approach

• Grant number: 19/25307-8
• Support type: Regular Research Grants
• Duration: February 01, 2021 - January 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Cooperation agreement: CONFAP - National Council of State Research Support Foundations
• Principal researcher: Fabiano Cutigi Ferrari
• Grantee: Fabiano Cutigi Ferrari
• Home Institution: Centro de Ciências Exatas e de Tecnologia (CCET). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Assoc. researchers: André Luiz Lins de Aquino ; Andrew Jefferson Offutt ; Auri Marcelo Rizzo Vincenzi ; Baldoino Fonseca dos Santos Neto ; Rohit Gheyi ; Valter Vieira de Camargo

Abstract

Smart City applications are currently used in varied critical domains such as transport and urban mobility, healthcare, housing, and public safety. For instance, technologies for traffic control help to reduce transit delays in large cities; however, failures in the traffic light system, for example, may cause accidents, and hence harming the citizens and raising concerns regarding the reliability of these systems. Therefore, Smart City applications must be developed to be robust and correct. Nevertheless, existing techniques to implement such quality attributes focus on specific parts of the systems (for instance, sensor networks), or are not sufficiently refined to be applied at the source code level. Objective: Establishing a fault-based approach for the development and validation of Smart City Applications, including fault tolerance and mutation testing, with focus on the urban mobility and traffic control domains. Method: We will create a catalog of fault, error and failure types that are inherent to these systems. The catalog will underlie the definition of fault tolerance and mutation testing approaches for the investigated context. Tooling support (for fault injection and mutation testing) will be developed and inter-integrated, as well as integrated with a simulator for Smart City applications. Experimental studies will be performed with evaluation and approach refinement purposes. Expected Results: Theoretical contributions (catalog of fault, error and failure types; and approaches for fault tolerance and mutation testing), automation contributions (tools), and experimental contributions (results from experimental studies), which will promote advances for the development of Smart City applications and the academy-industry technology transfer for this relevant domain of computational systems. (AU)