research-article

Detection of high-level execution patterns in reactive behavior of control programs

Authors:

Herbert Prähofer,

Roland Schatz,

Christian WirthAuthors Info & Claims

WODA '10: Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis

Pages 14 - 19

https://doi.org/10.1145/1868321.1868324

Published: 12 July 2010 Publication History

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Abstract

This paper presents an approach to extract high-level patterns from traces of programmable logic control (PLC) programs recorded with a deterministic replay debugging tool. Our deterministic replay debugging works by recording an application run in real-time with minimal overhead so that it can be reproduced afterwards. In a subsequent phase, the application is replayed in offline mode to produce a more detailed trace log with additional information about the application run. A software developer can replay the program in a debugger and use debugger features to analyze the program run and locate errors. However, due to the vast amount of data and the complex behavior of reactive control programs, a normal debugger is usually only a poor support in comprehending the program behavior. In this paper we present an approach to analyze recorded program runs of PLC applications. We present a technology to visualize the reactive behavior of a program run and find recurring high-level execution patterns in long-running applications. We give an overview of possible application scenarios to support program comprehension, testing, and debugging.

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Cited By

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Schatz RPrahofer H(2012)Analyzing Long-Running Controller Applications for Specification Violations Based on Deterministic ReplayProceedings of the 2012 38th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications10.1109/SEAA.2012.10(55-62)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SEAA.2012.10
Berger RPrahofer HWirth CSchatz R(2012)A tool for trace visualization and offline debugging of PLC applicationsProceedings of 2012 IEEE 17th International Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA 2012)10.1109/ETFA.2012.6489785(1-8)Online publication date: Sep-2012
https://doi.org/10.1109/ETFA.2012.6489785
Prahofer HSchatz RWirth CMossenbock H(2011)A Comprehensive Solution for Deterministic Replay Debugging of SoftPLC ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics10.1109/TII.2011.21667687:4(641-651)Online publication date: Nov-2011
https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2011.2166768

Index Terms

Detection of high-level execution patterns in reactive behavior of control programs
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Process validation
        Traceability
      2. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

WODA '10: Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis

July 2010

43 pages

ISBN:9781450301374

DOI:10.1145/1868321

Conference Chairs:
Jonathan Cook
New Mexico State University
,
James A. Jones
University of California - Irvine

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 12 July 2010

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ISSTA '10: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 12 - 16, 2010

Trento, Italy

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Schatz RPrahofer H(2012)Analyzing Long-Running Controller Applications for Specification Violations Based on Deterministic ReplayProceedings of the 2012 38th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications10.1109/SEAA.2012.10(55-62)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SEAA.2012.10
Berger RPrahofer HWirth CSchatz R(2012)A tool for trace visualization and offline debugging of PLC applicationsProceedings of 2012 IEEE 17th International Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA 2012)10.1109/ETFA.2012.6489785(1-8)Online publication date: Sep-2012
https://doi.org/10.1109/ETFA.2012.6489785
Prahofer HSchatz RWirth CMossenbock H(2011)A Comprehensive Solution for Deterministic Replay Debugging of SoftPLC ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics10.1109/TII.2011.21667687:4(641-651)Online publication date: Nov-2011
https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2011.2166768

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