Testing an Event-Specification Language

Rodolfo Gómez, Juan Carlos Augusto, and Antony Galton,

To appear in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'01), Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 13-15, 2001.

Abstract

The ability to detect complex events is essential for solving certain problems in computer science. Active databases rely on this ability for the application of Event-Condition-Action rules. A robot must be able to detect if an event occurred in order to decide what actions to perform next. In a real-time context, systems must be able to detect events to take key decisions.

A number of different sets of operators for detecting complex events and states have been propsed, allowing the detection of different kinds of complex events. Our work offers a set of test cases suited to the definitions provided by one of these sets. We believe these cases provide a general strategy that can be reused with other temporal systems. We have used these tests to guide the implementation of an event-detector prototype, and the goal of this article is to provide an introduction to the prototype and the test set.

Antony Galton

Last modified: Mon May 21 12:32:42 BST 2001