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Learning-Based Testing of an Industrial Measurement Device

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NASA Formal Methods (NFM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11460))

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Abstract

Active automata learning algorithms have gained increasing importance in the field of model-based system verification. For some classes of systems - especially deterministic systems, like Mealy machines, a variety of learning algorithm implementations is readily available. In this paper, we apply this technique to a measurement device from the automotive industry in order to systematically test its behaviour. However, our system under learning shows sparse non-deterministic behaviour, preventing the direct application of the available learning tools.

We propose an implementation of the active automata learning framework which masks this non-determinism. We repeat a previous model-based testing experiment with faulty devices and show that we can detect all injected faults. Most importantly, our technique was also able to find unknown bugs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Also known as membership query in literature.

  2. 2.

    Including the equivalence oracle, since both components produce output queries.

  3. 3.

    Simplified for the purpose of this work. In reality, the response to an S-command is either empty in the case of success or contains a specific error code.

  4. 4.

    In the notation for labelled transition systems, \(\tau \) signifies an internal action which is not triggered via an external input. \(\tau \) and inputs can be arbitrarily interleaved. signifies quiescence—i.e. the absence of an output.

  5. 5.

    In addition to the caching operations defined above, we also filter redundant output queries, as described by Margaria et al. [25].

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Acknowledgements

Part of this work was supported by the TU Graz LEAD project “Dependable Internet of Things in Adverse Environments”. We thank the four anonymous reviewers and Martin Tappler for their valuable feedback.

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Correspondence to Christian Burghard .

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Aichernig, B.K., Burghard, C., Korošec, R. (2019). Learning-Based Testing of an Industrial Measurement Device. In: Badger, J., Rozier, K. (eds) NASA Formal Methods. NFM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11460. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20652-9_1

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