English

Adaptive Testing for Specification Coverage

Software Engineering 2021-01-27 v2 Formal Languages and Automata Theory Computer Science and Game Theory Logic in Computer Science Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

Ensuring correctness of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is an extremely challenging task that is in practice often addressed with simulation based testing. Formal specification languages, such as Signal Temporal Logic (STL), are used to mathematically express CPS requirements and thus render the simulation activity more systematic and principled. We propose a novel method for adaptive generation of tests with specification coverage for STL. To achieve this goal, we devise cooperative reachability games that we combine with numerical optimization to create tests that explore the system in a way that exercise various parts of the specification. To the best of our knowledge our approach is the first adaptive testing approach that can be applied directly to MATLAB\texttrademark\; Simulink/Stateflow models. We implemented our approach in a prototype tool and evaluated it on several illustrating examples and a case study from the avionics domain, demonstrating the effectiveness of adaptive testing to (1) incrementally build a test case that reaches a test objective, (2) generate a test suite that increases the specification coverage, and (3) infer what part of the specification is actually implemented.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.06674,
  title  = {Adaptive Testing for Specification Coverage},
  author = {Ezio Bartocci and Roderick Bloem and Benedikt Maderbacher and Niveditha Manjunath and Dejan Ničković},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.06674},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:19:28.736Z