Automated Mode Coverage Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems using Hybrid Automata

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Testing of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) is a complex task, mainly due to the presence of continuous dynamics. In industry, CPSs are typically safety-critical and their complexity is rapidly increasing. Thus, it is important to know how well the tests perform. One common approach to ensuring test quality is to use coverage criteria, for example the well-known MC/DC. However, most of the used coverage criteria in industry depend on code structure to find errors in the system and may fail to capture the complete dynamical behaviour. Two coverage definitions are presented that can be used to ensure that all the continuous dynamics in the system have been explored. It is shown that the MC/DC criterion is not always rigorous enough to test all the system behaviour. Finally, the proposed coverage criteria are applied to automatically assess the test quality for a plant model used at Volvo Car Corporation.