TY - JOUR
T1 - UACFinder
T2 - Mining Syntactic Carriers of Unspecified Assumptions in Medical Cyber-Physical System Design Models
AU - Fu, Zhicheng
AU - Guo, Chunhui
AU - Zhang, Zhenyu
AU - Ren, Shangping
AU - Sha, Lui
N1 - Funding Information:
The work is supported in part by NSF CNS 1842710 and NSF CNS 1545002. Authors’ addresses: Z. Fu and C. Guo, Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology; emails: {zfu11, cguo13}@hawk.iit.edu; Z. Zhang, Department of Computer Science, San Diego State University; email: zzhang4430@sdsu.edu; S.Ren, Department of Computer Science, San Diego State University and Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology; email: sren@sdsu.edu; L. Sha, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; email: lrs@illinois.edu. 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 permissions@acm.org. © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. 2378-962X/2020/03-ART24 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3375405
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/5
Y1 - 2020/5
N2 - During the system development process, domain experts and developers often make assumptions about specifications and implementations. However, most of the assumptions being taken for granted by domain experts and developers are too tedious to be documented by them. When these unspecified assumptions are violated in an environment in which the system operates, failures can occur. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical device recall database, medical device recalls caused by software failures are at an all-time high. One major cause of these recalls is violations of unspecified assumptions made in medical systems. Therefore, it is crucial to have tools to automatically identify such unspecified assumptions at an early stage of the systems development process to avoid fatal failures. In this article, we present a tool called Unspecified Assumption Carrier Finder (UACFinder) that uses data mining techniques to automatically identify potential syntactic carriers of unspecified assumptions in system design models. The main idea of this tool is based on the observation we obtained from our earlier analysis of software failures in medical device recalls caused by unspecified assumptions. We observed that unspecified assumptions often exist in medical systems through syntactic carriers, such as constant variables, frequently read/updated variables, and frequently executed action sequences. Therefore, we develop the UACFinder to automatically find these potential unspecified assumption syntactic carriers rather than unspecified assumptions themselves. Once the UACFinder identifies the potential unspecified assumption syntactic carriers, domain experts and developers can validate whether these syntactic carriers indeed carry unspecified assumptions. We use a simplified cardiac arrest treatment scenario as a case study to evaluate the UACFinder in mining potential syntactic carriers of unspecified assumptions. In addition, we invite a medical doctor to validate unspecified assumptions carried by the mined syntactic carriers. The case study demonstrates that the UACFinder is effective in helping to identify potential unspecified assumptions from system design models.
AB - During the system development process, domain experts and developers often make assumptions about specifications and implementations. However, most of the assumptions being taken for granted by domain experts and developers are too tedious to be documented by them. When these unspecified assumptions are violated in an environment in which the system operates, failures can occur. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical device recall database, medical device recalls caused by software failures are at an all-time high. One major cause of these recalls is violations of unspecified assumptions made in medical systems. Therefore, it is crucial to have tools to automatically identify such unspecified assumptions at an early stage of the systems development process to avoid fatal failures. In this article, we present a tool called Unspecified Assumption Carrier Finder (UACFinder) that uses data mining techniques to automatically identify potential syntactic carriers of unspecified assumptions in system design models. The main idea of this tool is based on the observation we obtained from our earlier analysis of software failures in medical device recalls caused by unspecified assumptions. We observed that unspecified assumptions often exist in medical systems through syntactic carriers, such as constant variables, frequently read/updated variables, and frequently executed action sequences. Therefore, we develop the UACFinder to automatically find these potential unspecified assumption syntactic carriers rather than unspecified assumptions themselves. Once the UACFinder identifies the potential unspecified assumption syntactic carriers, domain experts and developers can validate whether these syntactic carriers indeed carry unspecified assumptions. We use a simplified cardiac arrest treatment scenario as a case study to evaluate the UACFinder in mining potential syntactic carriers of unspecified assumptions. In addition, we invite a medical doctor to validate unspecified assumptions carried by the mined syntactic carriers. The case study demonstrates that the UACFinder is effective in helping to identify potential unspecified assumptions from system design models.
KW - Medical cyber-physical systems
KW - data mining
KW - statechart models
KW - syntactic carriers
KW - unspecified assumptions
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85085528761&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85085528761&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3375405
DO - 10.1145/3375405
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85085528761
SN - 2378-962X
VL - 4
JO - ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems
JF - ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems
IS - 3
M1 - 3375405
ER -