TAV-CPS/IoT

Workshop on Testing, Analysis, and Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things

Embedded and cyber-physical systems (e.g., avionics, robotics, medical devices, IoT devices) are different from traditional systems: they are environment (e.g., hardware) dependent; they are distributed and can employ different concurrency control mechanisms to coordinate software components; they can have timing and performance constraints; they are heterogeneous and different components can be written in different languages; they have high security concerns. These characteristics render inapplicable the static and dynamic analysis techniques on which the traditional testing techniques (e.g., coverage, automated test case generation) rely. Therefore, applying these approaches can result in inadequately tested software.

The objective of this workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the challenges in testing real-world embedded and cyber-physical software systems, exchange ideas, and propose solutions to the challenges. The workshop also aims to bring researchers and practitioners together, identify the gap between theory and practice, and provide insights for future work.

The ISSTA Workshop on Testing, Analysis, and Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things (TAV-CPS/IoT) is co-located with ISSTA since 2017. TAV-CPS/IoT was formerly known as TECPS. The workshop will take place on Thursday, July 19th, 2018: the day after the main ISSTA conference. TAV-CPS/IoT covers a wide range of issues and topics including how to perform effective and efficient analysis on cyber-physical systems and Internet of Things, how the characteristics of these systems affect the maintainability of these systems, how to handle bugs and security issues that are specific to these systems, how to automatically generate test cases and test oracles, how to monitor and diagnose these systems, and how integration between applications and lower-level software components can be improved to facilitate testing for certain types of systems.

Workshop Format

TAV-CPS/IoT is a participatory workshop, where attendees will have the opportunity to actively engage in the many discussion activities planned for the workshop. Authors whose papers are accepted will give presentations. Sessions will be organized around the workshop theme and determined by the organizing committee. The workshop will include keynote presentations and invited talks around the original vision of TAV-CPS/IoT.

Accepted Papers

Call for Submissions

TAV-CPS/IoT invites submissions of papers describing at least one primary thrust of your prior or current work. Your submission could be a summary of the primary challenge you have addressed in testing and analysis of cyber-physical systems and Internet of Things, or it could describe current work you are engaged in, or it could present a challenge even without any current solution. We invite three kinds of submissions.

• Full Papers (6 pages): Results of past research, research in progress, tools, experience reports.

• New Idea Papers (4 pages): Innovative new ideas supported by promising initial evidence.

• Extended Abstracts (2 pages): Description of an important problem, prediction of potential novel directions, discussion of open research questions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following ones:

• Testing techniques for CPS/IoT

• Formal verification techniques for CPS/IoT

• Program analysis techniques for CPS/IoT

• Tools and infrastructures for CPS/IoT testing, analysis, or verification

• Using simulation to support testing for CPS/IoT

• Bug characteristics study for CPS/IoT

• Testing as a service for CPS/IoT

• Modeling techniques for CPS/IoT to support testing and verification

• IoT middleware testing

• Empirical study on any of the above topics

Papers are to be submitted via the hotcrp TAV-CPS/IoT 2018 submission website. They must be written in English, provided as PDF documents, and follow the new ACM Master Article Template with the sigconf option.

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three reviewers and all accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

There is a new wave of pervasive computing applications, which synergistically fuse the sensing and analytics capabilities of personal wearable/mobile devices and cheap IoT platforms to capture fine-grained human and environmental context. In this talk, I will first describe and review recent/ongoing work on a diverse set of such wearable and IoT-assisted applications, including smartwatch-based diet monitoring, Bluetooth beacon-based in-store shopper behavior analytics, VR smartglass-based empathetic accessibility testing of mobile applications and wearable-based remote monitoring of factory machinery. Through these applications, I shall distill some of their common characteristics that distinguish them from conventional desktop/mobile “productivity” applications, such as: (i) the use of multi-sensor processing pipelines & supervised machine learning, (ii) real-time requirements to support interactive and immersive interfaces, and (iii) distributed cross-device execution of application components. The combination of physical sensing, wireless communication and computationally intensive processing in such applications leads to novel forms of application failure and non-performance. I shall conclude with some early thoughts on new testing capabilities and paradigms needed to tackle such wearable/IoT based cyber-physical systems and applications.

Archan Misra is a Professor, and the Associate Dean of Research, in the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU). He is also a Director of two major research centers at SMU: the Center for Applied Smart-Nation Analytics (CASA) and LiveLabs. Over a 20-year research career spanning both academics and industry (at IBM Research and Bellcore), Archan has worked extensively on a broad set of technologies spanning wireless networking, mobile & wearable computing, and data analytics. His current research interests lie in applying mobile & wearable sensing, IoT technologies and real-time analytics to understand human activities and ambient context for a variety of urban-computing applications. Archan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, and chaired the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) from 2005-2007.