Mode-Aware Concolic Testing for PLC Software

Abstract

During the development of PLC software, standards usually require testing to consider certain coverage criteria. Since a manual generation of coverage tests is tedious and error-prone, automatic approaches as concolic testing are highly desirable. Approaches targeting non-reactive software usually cannot address their peculiarities, e. g. the cyclic execution combined with state-machine behaviour. Hence, we present a novel concolic testing technique to fill this gap. In particular, our technique utilises operation modes that typically describe the state machine semantics of single units in PLC programs, also called function blocks. This allows for guiding symbolic execution along paths that conform with the state-machine semantics and are likely to uncover new program behaviour. We show that our technique efficiently generates coverage tests for a variety of programs, outperforming existing approaches tailored to PLC software.