Testing Vehicle-Mounted Systems: A Stepwise Symbolic Execution Approach for OSEK/VDX Programs

Haitao Zhang, Bowen Pu

Abstract: OSEK/VDX is a standard for automotive embedded systems, and it has been widely adopted by many automotive companies to develop a vehicle-mounted system. However, the ever increasing complexity of developed OSEK/VDX multi-tasking programs has created a challenge to ensure reliability. This paper presents an efficient approach that applies a new variety of symbolic execution called stepwise symbolic execution to explore paths included in an OSEK/VDX multi-tasking program for checking its reliability. A series of experiments have been carried out to investigate the performance of the approach based on an implemented prototype tool. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is capable of performing a much more wider and deeper exploration on the OSEK/VDX programs compared with the existing testing techniques.