QA Consultants Hosts ITEA 2020 Plenary Meeting (Day One)

QAC EmTech
QAC Emerging Technologies Quality Assurance

This monthly newsletter will focus on QAC’s activities regarding R&D, Connected Vehicles, Cognitive Autonomous Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and Blockchain Quality Assurance Services.

FOCUSED ON THE FUTURE

Leading the way

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the EmTech newsletter. In this edition, we’ll focus on the recent XIVT project virtual Plenary meeting hosted by QAC. We will also review various presentations from the XIVT Project Plenary meeting such as the Welcome and Cybersecurity sessions along with XIVT case studies.

Welcome to the 13th edition of our EmTech Quality Assurance Newsletter

Keeping you informed

Our emerging technologies quality assurance workstreams

R&D and Grant Projects

Research and development of new technologies that position QAC to become a world leader in quality assurance services.

Connected Vehicles

Testing and Quality Assurance services exclusively developed to provide integration testing services for highly connected vehicles.

Cognitive Autonomous Systems

Fully automation of testing and quality Assurance services exclusively developed for Cognitive Autonomous Systems

Cybersecurity, IoT, AI, and Blockchain

Focus on developing new technologies that utilizes AI to address QA challenges on Cybersecurity, IoT, and Blockchain domains

Headquarted in the Netherlands, the ITEA program is a publicly funded project on a national level. ITEA stimulates innovation projects in a global community of large industry, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), start-ups, and customer organizations. Together, organizations are able to create actual commercial results from research projects. The group provides a trusted framework for cooperation in which standard project collaboration agreements are available, including the complex domains of confidentiality. The XIVT project is a part of ITEA.

On behalf of Canadian participants, QA Consultants hosted the fourth annual XIVT Plenary meeting. The meeting was held from November 3rd to November 5th , 2020. Partners from around the world discussed the progress of Work Packages (WPs), deliverables, and current issues and associated risks.

Peter Watkins, QA Consultants’ COO and Plenary Chair, opened the Welcome Session with opening remarks. Immediately afterwards, Alex Rodov QA Consultants’ Founder and Managing Partner highlighted the importance of QAC’s work during the pandemic and extended warm wishes to all XIVT participants.

It was QA Consultants’ honour to host Jiang Chen, the National Coordinator for the EUREKA-ITEA Cluster Program at NRC-IRAP. Chen discussed the importance of the XIVT project within the group.

Cybersecurity testing services for CAVs

The Plenary then continued with the first session, a presentation, and a follow up discussions on Cybersecurity in Vehicles delivered by Prof. Jeremy from OntarioTech University. He started with a short introduction on Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and cybersecurity in the context of CAVs and continued with defining the role of Cybersecurity in XIVT.

The conversation focused on Intrusion Detection within the Controller Area Network (CAN bus) in autonomous vehicles. Various topics were discussed such as, types of attacks on CAN bus, Denial of Service (DoS), fuzzing, and security standards related to CAVs.

A work plan was introduced that included anomaly-based detection of cybersecurity attacks in CAVs using machine learning. Moreover,the performance of anomaly-based detection approach is assessed utilizing a use case defined by XIVT in the automotive domain of anomaly-based detection method utilizing a XIVT use case in the automotive domain.

In collaboration with OTU (Ontario Tech University), QA Consultants contributed and participated in the development of a security testing framework and configurable system approach. As a result, a state-of-the-art report and a white paper on cybersecurity was prepared and shared with all participants.

CYBERSECURITY

“The strategies,practices and techniques to mitigate security risks and ensure that a given system is protected against unauthorized and malicious actions.”

Peter Watkins

Toni Jardini

Spencer Reuben

Farsam Farzadpour

Akramul Azim

Jeremy Bradbury

Khalil El-Khatib

Joelma Peixoto

Omar Minawi

Naida Tania

Masoud Khatibi

Josh Harrington

Safwan Alam

Justin Gammage

The XIVT project is driven by industrial use cases for testing highly configurable, variant-rich embedded systems in the automotive, rail, industrial production, and telecommunication domains. The following is an abstract overview of the presented use cases that were presented in the Plenary meeting.

Industrial production domain

This use case is a flexible production unit called CUBE that is focused on testing the PLC program. The plant manufacturer is facing an implementation challenge when it comes to the systematic and automated testing of the extended PLC programs. This is due to increase in complexity over time. Current developers don’t have an overview of existing PLC programs when integrating anew product.

Telecom domain

OneDesk BPM (Business Process Management) is a platform for developing various workflows. This product has built-in modules like ITSM (Change, Incident, Problem Management, Service Request, etc.), Administrative Affairs, etc. The goal is to develop a Web User Interface Based Test Automation Solution to provide an easy to use BDD (Behavior Driven Development) framework. Developing/writing test automation scripts for mobile and web applications requires experience in various programming languages. Additionally, it demands significant know-how on Android/IOS for Mobile and Html, JavaScript for Web Applications, and is proving to be a major challenge.

Industrial production domain

The third use case was the 800xA system that is a resource-constrained and mission-critical distributed control system. There are different variants of the system that can exist due to e.g., the customer required configurations and settings that should be identified. Therefore, there is a need for identifying and evaluating different system variants. The challenge here is testing all of the 800xA system configurations.

Automotive domain

QA Consultants presented a high-definition database map for autonomous vehicles. The product utilizes various types of sensors such as LiDAR, RADAR, Camera, etc. In autonomous technology terms, this product qualifies as a Level Two classification. Challenges occur when new changes to the environment might not be reflected in the map database by the time a vehicle comes across them. Other difficulties include the existence of gaps and other defects in the map data.