Seamless Simulation-Based Verification and Validation of Event-Driven Software Systems

Verification and validation (V&V) are essential concerns in the development of safety-critical distributed software systems. V&V efforts targeting full system implementations rely on testing, which requires real-world deployments and cumbersome analysis to track down issues across distributed software components. Here, we propose a simulation-based development and testing framework for distributed systems following the event-driven architecture (EDA) paradigm. During development, unmodified software components can be executed in their interaction with a simulated environment, allowing for early testing under envisioned deployments. After introducing the interplay of EDA and discrete-event simulation, we present our framework's architecture and the API offered to software components, which closely follows accepted EDA principles. We demonstrate the use of our framework on a medical software system used in the diagnosis of rare genetic diseases. By observing the system's interaction with simulated laboratories, the feedback loop between diagnoses by laboratories and classifications from the software system is evaluated.