Falls Church, VA (August 15, 2003) -- The Reactis tool suite of Reactive Systems, Inc. (RSI) enables engineers to detect subtle design errors that evade detection using traditional validation techniques, according to a report titled "Automated Unit Test Vector Generation" released by engineers at The Ford Motor Company.
The report describes the application of Reactis to two automotive applications: an electric seat controller and an automatic transmission.
The report notes that the seat controller software is surprisingly complex and challenging to test: "A model of this level of complexity would typically require a significant amount of time to develop inputs to appropriately 'exercise' its functionality." Reactis greatly speeds up this process by generating such inputs automatically.
The report goes on to state that, during the analysis of the seat controller software, Reactis "directly uncovered one variable overflow error, and led to the discovery of two logical errors ... None of these errors had been identified by previous testing."
The report also describes the use of Reactis to generate high-quality test data for an automatic transmission model. This data can be used to ensure that the software ultimately deployed in the transmission conforms to the model.
Ford published their success story as part of the Model-Based Integration of Embedded Software initiative sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
RSI is a privately held company headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia.