Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Internet of Things (IoT) is about connecting everything, including daily life objects, for a more connected and better world. It is reaching billions of connected objects to enable applications ranging from smart homes, smart cities to connected cars, health, and energy. These IoT systems are large and complex as their architectures include devices for sensing and devices for acting, fog (including edge) and cloud computing for efficient computing, decision making and analytics. Moreover, IoT applications, in several domains like health and energy for instance, may be subject to stringent real-time, safety and availability requirements. IoT is being investigated from different perspectives, but a little has been done so far for quality assurance of IoT systems. The goal of the proposed research program is to investigate live testing and validation of IoT applications taking into account the inherent distributed architecture and dynamicity of IoT systems. Live testing is about testing an application in its production environment without causing an intolerable disruption to its usage, i.e. testing is performed while the system continues to function and provide services. The development and production environments are usually different and one has to validate the application in the real production environment, under real conditions. This production environment changes and evolves over time with the deployment of other IoT applications/systems. With this proposal, we aim at devising and establishing a framework for live testing of IoT applications and its validation in a realistic environment. The framework will enable the automated online testing of IoT applications upon request, partial failure or performance degradation in the system. The framework will consist of an architecture, where the roles of the different components will be defined rigorously with the help of a modeling framework, techniques for test isolation, test methods, test selection and generation, and test optimization methods. The proposed research program aims at contributing to the quality assurance for IoT applications/systems and to the model driven software engineering discipline with novel techniques and architecture(s) for complex software systems testing and validation. It will contribute to improving the quality of nowadays pervasive IoT applications/systems for a better life. The proposed research program will train six graduate students who will join the Canadian work force and contribute to the Canadian economy in the critical domain of Information and Computing Technologies.