Requirements-Aided Automatic Test Case Generation for Industrial Cyber-physical Systems

Roopak Sinha, Cheng Pang, Gerardo Santillan Martinez, Juha Kuronen, Valeriy Vyatkin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

Abstract

Industrial cyber-physical systems require complex distributed software to orchestrate many heterogeneous mechatronic components and control multiple physical processes. Industrial automation software is typically developed in a model-driven fashion where abstractions of physical processes called plant models are co-developed and iteratively refined along with the control code. Testing such multi-dimensional systems is extremely difficult because often models might not be accurate, do not correspond accurately with subsequent refinements, and the software must eventually be tested on the real plant, especially in safety-critical systems like nuclear plants. This paper proposes a framework wherein high-level functional requirements are used to automatically generate test cases for designs at all abstraction levels in the model-driven engineering process. Requirements are initially specified in natural language and then analyzed and specified using a formalized ontology. The requirements ontology is then refined along with controller and plant models during design and development stages such that test cases can be generated automatically at any stage. A representative industrial water process system case study illustrates the strengths of the proposed formalism. The requirements meta-model proposed by the CESAR European project is used for requirements engineering while IEC 61131-3 and model-driven concepts are used in the design and development phases. A tool resulting from the proposed framework called REBATE (Requirements Based Automatic Testing Engine) is used to generate and execute test cases for increasingly concrete controller and plant models.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, ICECCS
PublisherIEEE
Pages198-201
Number of pages4
Volume2016-January
ISBN (Print)9781467385817
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jan 2016
MoE publication typeA4 Conference publication
EventInternational Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems - Gold Coast, Australia
Duration: 9 Dec 201511 Dec 2015
Conference number: 20

Publication series

Name
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems
Abbreviated titleICECCS
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityGold Coast
Period09/12/201511/12/2015

Keywords

  • CESAR
  • model-based testing
  • model-driven engineering
  • ontologies
  • requirements
  • test case generation

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