Coverage Explorer: Coverage-guided Test Generation for Cyber Physical Systems

Abstract

Given the safety-critical functions of autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) across diverse domains, testing these systems is essential. While conventional software and hardware testing methodologies offer partial insights, they frequently do not provide adequate coverage in a CPS. In this study, we introduce a testing framework designed to systematically formulate test cases, effectively exploring the state space of CPS. This framework introduces a coverage-centric sampling technique, coupled with a cluster-based methodology for training a surrogate model. The framework then uses model predictive control within the surrogate model to generates test cases tailored to CPS specifications. To evaluate the efficacy of the framework, we applied it on several benchmarks, spanning from a kinematic car to systems like an unmanned aircraft collision avoidance system (ACAS XU) and automatic transmission system. Comparative analyses were conducted against alternative test generation strategies, including randomized testing, as well as falsification using S-TaLiRo.