Search-based Trace Diagnostic
Preprint, 2024

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) development requires verifying whether system behaviors violate their requirements. This analysis often considers system behaviors expressed by execution traces and requirements expressed by signal-based temporal properties. When an execution trace violates a requirement, engineers need to solve the trace diagnostic problem: They need to understand the cause of the breach. Automated trace diagnostic techniques aim to support engineers in the trace diagnostic activity. This paper proposes search-based trace-diagnostic (SBTD), a novel trace-diagnostic technique for CPS requirements. Unlike existing techniques, SBTD relies on evolutionary search. SBTD starts from a set of candidate diagnoses, applies an evolutionary algorithm iteratively to generate new candidate diagnoses (via mutation, recombination, and selection), and uses a fitness function to determine the qualities of these solutions. Then, a diagnostic generator step is performed to explain the cause of the trace violation. We implemented Diagnosis, an SBTD tool for signal-based temporal logic requirements expressed using the Hybrid Logic of Signals (HLS). We evaluated Diagnosis by performing 34 experiments for 17 trace-requirements combinations leading to a property violation and by assessing the effectiveness of SBTD in producing informative diagnoses and its efficiency in generating them on a time basis. Our results confirm that Diagnosis can produce informative diagnoses in practical time for most of our experiments (33
out of 34).

Diagnostics

Run-time verification

Cyber-physical systems

Tem- poral properties

Signals

Trace checking

Author

Gabriel Araujo

University of Brasilia

Ricardo Diniz Caldas

Software Engineering 2

Federico Formica

McMaster University

Genaina Nunes Rodrigues

University of Brasilia

Patrizio Pelliccione

Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI)

Claudio Menghi

McMaster University

University of Bergamo

Subject Categories (SSIF 2011)

Software Engineering

Computer Science

More information

Latest update

3/19/2025