Structural Coverability for Intelligent Automation Systems

Paper in proceeding, 2023

In order to be flexible and handle complex scenarios, intelligent automation systems might benefit from automated planning techniques which rely on specifications and models describing their behavior. However, due to the presence of message passing, latency, jitter, timeouts, failures, and error handling, the verification of such behavior models using formal methods is often unfeasible. Therefore, testing has emerged as an approach to evaluating the behavior of intelligent automation systems. This paper presents a way to analyze structural coverability of behavior models for intelligent automation systems, which is inspired by the modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) criterion. This is paired with a testing procedure that enables each test case to influence both the controller and the simulated environment by injecting some specific state. As a result, the proposed coverability criterion can effectively identify segments of the behavior model that have not been adequately tested and suggest additional test cases to improve coverability. An example use case is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.