Simulated or Physical? An Empirical Study on Input Validation for Context-aware Systems in Different Environments

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Context-Aware Systems (a.k.a. CASs) integrate cyber and physical space to provide context-aware adaptive functionalities. Building context-aware systems is challenging due to the uncertainty of the real physical environment. Therefore, input validation for context-aware systems plays a significant role in keeping the systems executing safely. Input validation approaches have been proposed to monitor and guard the executions of context-aware systems. However, few of these works (17%, 2 out of 12) evaluated their approaches with a real context-aware system in a real physical environment. In this paper, we study and compare the effectiveness of input validation approaches for context-aware system in both a simulated and a physical environment. We built a testing platform, RM-Testing, based on DJI RoboMaster S1 robot car. We implemented three up-to-date input validation approaches, and evaluated their effectiveness in improving the success rate of the robot car’s executions. The results show that the selected input validation approaches are effective in guarantee the safe execution of context-aware systems, which improve the success rate by 82% in the simulated environment, and 50% in the physical environment. However, the effectiveness of these approaches does vary in different environment. Thus, we believe that such CASs-based input validation works should be evaluated in the physical environment to better validate their effectiveness and usefulness.