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Aspirations toward technological sovereignty increasingly pervade the political debate. Yet, an ambiguous definition leaves the exact goal of those aspirations and the policies to fulfil them unclear. This opens the door for vested interests who benefit from misinterpreting the goal, e.g., as a strive for autarky, nationalism, and the rollback of globalization. To close this gap, we show how certain key technologies challenge state sovereignty as conventionally understood. By interpreting technological sovereignty in this light, we develop a competence-based definition, which puts innovation policy at the core of fulfilling sovereignty aspirations. Moreover, we establish the important role of international cooperation and trade to enhance technological sovereignty understood as ability. Hence, autarky would be detrimental rather than helpful to technological sovereignty. Two case studies illustrate how innovation policy helps to achieve technological sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY A main requirement for the Future Internet is to enable self-management behaviors facilitating the network to adapt to changing conditions and self-heal in the face of erroneous states. On the basis of Autonomic Fault-Management principles, this paper proposes a framework consisting of a set of components operating inside the network elements and allowing the devices to collaboratively realize self-healing. In that context, Autonomic Fault-Management is intuitively constituted by the detection of the presence of faulty conditions, followed in turn by the self-diagnosis and identification of the corresponding root causes, and completed consequently by the removal of the identified root causes and their effects. The proposed framework implements a distributed control loop that interacts with the network operations personnel in case the current erroneous state is not resolvable by means of Autonomic Fault-Management. We argue that there are a number of mutual benefits between our proposed framework and the IPv6 protocol suite. This is demonstrated by a case study that illustrates these benefits and shows how the capabilities of IPv6 can be enhanced through the self-healing mechanisms of the proposed framework. Finally, the prototype implementation used for the case study is analyzed in terms of scalability and overhead produced in the network nodes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software testing has often to be done under severe pressure due to limited resources and a challenging time schedule facing the demand to assure the fulfillment of the software requirements. In addition, testing should unveil those software defects that harm the mission-critical functions of the software. Risk-based testing uses risk (re-)assessments to steer all phases of the test process to optimize testing efforts and limit risks of the software-based system. Due to its importance and high practical relevance, several risk-based testing approaches were proposed in academia and industry. This paper presents a taxonomy of risk-based testing providing a framework to understand, categorize, assess, and compare risk-based testing approaches to support their selection and tailoring for specific purposes. The taxonomy is aligned with the consideration of risks in all phases of the test process and consists of the top-level classes risk drivers, risk assessment, and risk-based test process. The taxonomy of risk-based testing has been developed by analyzing the work presented in available publications on risk-based testing. Afterwards, it has been applied to the work on risk-based testing presented in this special section of the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This overview article presents the Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) success story and serves as an introduction to this Special Section that contains five articles selected from the TTCN-3 user conference in 2011. The article sketches the development of TTCN-3 from its very beginning. It summarizes the current status of the language by reviewing its standardization process, available test suites, tools, and services as well as its training program. In addition, the article puts the articles selected for this Special Section into perspective, with regard to the evolution of TTCN-3 and the testing methodology in general. Last but not least, it discusses indicators for possible future developments of TTCN-3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TTCN-3 has gained increasing significance in recent years. It was originally developed to fit the needs of testing software-based applications and systems in the telecommunication industry and has shown its applicability to a wide range of other industrial domains in the mean time. TTCN-3 provides platform-independent, universal and powerful concepts to describe tests, especially for discrete, interactive systems. However, TTCN-3 addresses systems with discrete input and output characteristics only. The lack of powerful means that reasonably allow specifying and evaluating continuous data flow makes TTCN-3 sufficient neither for the automotive industry nor for other industries that deal with highly complex software-based control systems. This paper introduces the notion of streams, stream ports and stream templates to TTCN-3. It revises the initial design of continuous TTCN-3, a TTCN-3 extension for testing continuous or hybrid systems [20,21] and demonstrates the applicability for a case study that is typical for testing embedded control systems in the automotive industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

System-level testing considers functionality and load aspects to check how a system performs for single service requests and scales as the number of service requests accessing/using it increases. This paper presents a flexible test framework including functional, service interaction and load tests. It is generic in terms of being largely independent of the system to be tested. The paper discusses the automation of the test framework with the Testing and Test Control Notation TTCN-3 and also presents an implementation of the test framework using a TTCN-3 toolset. The test framework is exemplified for Web service tests and demonstrates distributed functional and load tests for a specific Web service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the evolution of the new version of the Tree and Tabular Combined Notation (TTCN), which is TTCN-3, standing for Testing and Test Control Notation version 3. Accordingly , it has been launched by a group of testing experts at the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) as the latest standardised test technology to maintain and improve the needs of its user community.

Model-based testing (MBT) strives to automatically and systematically generate test cases. In this column, Ina Schieferdecker introduces MBT technologies and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Modern IP-based wide-area surveillance systems often build on networks of multi-modal, intelligent and mobile sensor units. Detection of complex events is performed on intelligent sensors and fusing input in the sensor units or centralized control room components. The domain of surveillance and public safety creates requirement for robustness and fault-tolerance. This article will present an automated intelligence architecture for mobile surveillance, which provides capabilities for combining on-board event detection in sensor units, centralized decision making on the server side, and automated exploitation of mobile surveillance unit positioning data. This architecture must be very reliable to provide services in the face of challenges such as natural disasters and fire, potentially damaging the infrastructure of the surveillance system. To increase its reliability and robustness, we study the introduction of a self-healing system into the architecture and examine the combined system's operation in three case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of relevant embedded system issues and some potential solutions. One of the factors that can drive specific technical problems for embedded systems is hardware obsolescence. It details the basic intuitive workflow behind the Security-by-Contract framework developed within the European S3MS project. It notes that the most widely used technique for evaluating a software-based system in its target environment is testing.