Abstract

System testing of real-time embedded systems (RTES) is a challenging task and only a fully automated testing approach can scale up to the testing requirements of industrial RTES. One such approach, which offers the advantage for testing teams to be black-box, is to use environment models to automatically generate test cases and oracles and an environment simulator to enable earlier and more practical testing. In this paper, we propose novel heuristics for search-based, RTES system testing which are based on these environment models. We evaluate the fault detection effectiveness of two search-based algorithms, i.e., Genetic Algorithms and (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm, when using these novel heuristics and their combinations. Preliminary experiments on 13 carefully selected, non-trivial artificial problems, show that, under certain conditions, these novel heuristics are effective at bringing the environment into a state exhibiting a system fault. The heuristic combination that showed the best overall performance on the artificial problems was applied on an industrial case study where it showed consistent results.