Industrial evaluation of functional Model-Based Testing for process control applications using CAEX

Abstract

Model-Based Testing (MBT) is expected to increase test coverage and reduce the development and maintenance effort of test suites. However, MBT approaches require source information such as UML diagrams that are not produced by many companies in the industrial automation domain. This paper investigates the possibility of using IEC 62424 and CAEX to facilitate MBT state machine model building with source information specific to the industrial automation domain. An experiment and industry feedback demonstrated a capability for discovering challenging faults, but also, that the modelling effort needs to be reduced for feasibility. First steps for generating MBT models from CAEX design information are presented in this paper.