Introducing plant features to model-based testing of programmable controllers in automation systems

This paper proposes a model-based test generation approach for programmable controllers that aims at reducing the length of a test sequence by applying plant features. The proposed approach does not require detailed or full knowledge of the plant behavior of a system under test, but it can achieve a remarkable reduction with simple plant features. As a result, the obtained test sequence can be significantly shorter than ones generated by complete testing methods; and meanwhile, it still reaches full coverage of the nominal behavior of the system under test. This makes it feasible to test large-scale systems, or to serve as an early test in the validation of safety critical systems. The proposed approach has been illustrated on a large-scale case study.