Test case design is the most important activity for a trustworthy software test. Formal speci cations are solid foundations for systematizing the test procedure and for supporting it with tools. In the talk a method for generating test cases based on formal speci cations of reactive systems is presented. The speci cation notation used is a combination of Z and Statecharts, where Z schemas are u...

Several requirements specification styles for the specification of reactive systems have been proposed in the literature. Informal specifications are the most widely used in the software industry nowadays, mainly because they are “understandable” by domain experts and software engineers, and therefore can be included as part of a software contract. Unfortunately, because of the inherent ambigui...

This paper describes Jal, the new AUV designed by the student team of IURS for the purpose of shallow water survey, analysis and pipeline repair and monitoring operations. Propelled by two lateral and vertical propulsion thrusters, Jal weighs only about 7 Kg and measures close to 0.45 m in length and 0.36 m in width & height. Onboard sensor systems, custom passive sonar, real-time computer visi...

Patterns have been successfully applied in software development to improve the development process, by facilitating reuse, communication and documentation of sound solutions. However, the testing domain is yet to benefit from a similar approach. This although, with the growing complexity of test automation solutions, identifying and instrumenting patterns in test design to facilitate reuse appe...

Modern window-based user interfaces are actually a special kind of reactive system, and Petri nets may be fruitfully used to design such user computer dialogues. This paper describes a software engineering tool aimed at supporting the use of high-level Petri nets for the specification, design and implementation of user interfaces in an event-driven interface system. We assess the rationale for ...

Today, many industrial production cells are controlled by software. Many such systems have to deal with requirements which the developer has to guarantee. Because of the complexity of the implementation one of the main problems for developing the software for reactive systems is to be sure that such properties are fulfilled. One way to handle the problems is to use formal methods: This means to...

Model and component based design is an established means for the development of large software systems, and is starting to get momentum in the realm of embedded software development. In case of safety critical (dependable systems) it is crucial that the underlying model and its realization captures the requirements on the timely behavior of the system, and that these requirements can be preserv...

Responsive environments are physical surroundings whose components change their behaviour to accommodate the presence of people as well as other components. We describe a means to manage such responsive environments whereby each component is dynamically assigned a software agent. Software agents are autonomous and reactive/proactive programs that communicate via message-passing. Arbitrary funct...

The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for distributed autonomous robotics systems. In this article, a prototype distributed architecture for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle experimentation is presented which supports the development of intelligent capabilities and th...

This article describes a graduate course on the subject of \Reactive and Real-Time Systems", which serves as the basis for courses taught by the authors at Bar-Ilan University and at Tel-Aviv University, and undergraduate course at the Netania Academic College and The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaao. The course focuses on the development of provably correct reactive or real-time systems. It i...