A Two-phase Metamorphic Approach for Testing Industrial Control Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a two-phase metamorphic testing approach for industrial control systems that learns fault patterns and uses them for targeted, automated testing to improve fault detection efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-phase metamorphic testing method that extracts relations from system requirements and logs for automated fault detection in industrial control systems.

Findings

Effective fault discovery demonstrated on a position control system

Automated generation of source and follow-up tests

Increased fault detection efficiency

Abstract

We elaborate on a metamorphic approach for testing industrial control systems. The proposed approach consists of two phases: an exploration phase in which we learn about fault patterns of the system under test and an exploitation phase where the observed fault patterns are used for targeted testing. Our method extracts metamorphic relations and input space of the system from its requirements. The seed input used for testing is extracted from the execution logs of the system and used to generate source tests and follow-up tests automatically. The morphed input is constructed based on the seed input and refined using a set of constraints. The approach is exemplified on a position control system and the results show that it is effective in discovering faults with an increased level of automation.