Automatic Generation of Test System Instances for Configurable Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are ubiquitous systems that integrate digital technologies with physical processes. These systems are becoming configurable to respond to the different needs that users demand. As a consequence, their variability is increasing, and they can be configured in many system variants. To ensure a systematic test execution of CPSs, a test system must be elaborated encapsulating several sources such as test cases or test oracles. Manually building a test system for each configuration is a non-systematic, time-consuming, and error-prone process. To overcome these problems, we designed a test system for testing CPSs and we analyzed the variability that it needed to test different configurations. Based on this analysis, we propose a methodology supported by a tool named ASTERYSCO that automatically generates simulation-based test system instances to test individual configurations of CPSs. To evaluate the proposed methodology, we selected different configurations of a configurable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, and measured the time required to generate their test systems. On average, around 119 s were needed by our tool to generate the test system for 38 configurations. In addition, we compared the process of generating test system instances between the method we propose and a manual approach. Based on this comparison, we believe that the proposed tool allows a systematic method of generating test system instances. We believe that our approach permits an important step toward the full automation of testing in the field of configurable CPSs.