English

Complete FSM Testing Using Strong Separability

Software Engineering 2025-02-07 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

Apartness is a concept developed in constructive mathematics, which has resurfaced as a powerful notion for separating states in the area of model learning and model-based testing. We identify some fundamental shortcomings of apartness in quantitative models, such as in hybrid and stochastic systems. We propose a closely-related alternative, called strong separability and show that using it to replace apartness addresses the identified shortcomings. We adapt a well-known complete model-based testing method, called the Harmonized State Identifiers (HSI) method, to adopt the proposed notion of strong separability. We prove that the adapted HSI method is complete. As far as we are aware, this is the first work to show how complete test suites can be generated for quantitative models such as those found in the development of cyber-physical systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.04035,
  title  = {Complete FSM Testing Using Strong Separability},
  author = {Robert M. Hierons and Mohammad Reza Mousavi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.04035},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:34:44.491Z