A fault location method for aging bugs in Flight Control Software

With the increasing complexity of flight control software, it becomes very challenging to improve the reliability of flight control software. There is a kind of software aging bugs which can reduce the system memory and eventually trigger failure, which will seriously affect the reliability of flight control software. Aiming at the bugs, a context-based software aging fault location method is proposed. Thie basic idea of the proposed method is to transfer the main circulation model of the flight control software into a task tree, and then extract main cycle executions runs into a sequence of task tree. By utilizing Cox-Stuart Test, the memory attribute of the central node of the task tree is detected to find the suspicious task. Thereafter, according to the relationship among the task tree series, suspicious tasks are selected to locate defects. The function of suspicious task is the location of the defect. Finally, an experiment is implemented and the results show that the proposed method can not only locate the defect, but also show the call context.