Test case generation for flexible real-time control systems

Temporal correctness is crucial for the dependability of realtime control systems. A problem with testing such systems is the dependency on the execution orders of tasks. Mutationbased testing criteria have been proposed to determine which execution orders need to be exercised to verify that realtime systems are timely. For flexible control systems, timeliness in itself may only be relevant for a subset of tasks, whereas maintained control performance in the presence of worstcase jitter and disturbances is essential. This paper presents an extension to the cosimulator tool TrueTime, to support mutation based testing of control performance and timeliness. Further, an approach for automatic generation of test cases using genetic algorithms is presented. A conclusion is that testing criteria for timeliness can be used to increase confidence in the dependability of flexible control systems. 1