Wednesday 30 Jan 13:15 in ED

David Thönnessen

Testing safety-related industrial systems is usually carried out on the basis of checklists. A tester has a list of scenarios that he manually applies to the system and checks whether the system behaves according to its specification. Operators behave unpredictably. Their behavior may not be covered by the set of scenarios tested and may lead to dangerous situations. To avoid this, randomized test case generation can be useful as it allows for a huge number of different scenarios. The presented framework utilizes a tool for randomized test case generation, QuickCheck, to trigger event sequences that are then applied to a safety PLC. Evaluations show that this concept is capable of finding errors in safety implementations or increasing the tester’s confidence in the correctness of the code by a large number of passed test cases. While this concept points out to be powerful, it does not require much effort of the tester as the execution of test cases does not require user interaction.

Slides are available here.

Biography

David Thönnessen received the B.Sc. degree (2012) and the M.Sc. degree (2014) from the Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Since 2014, he is a research assistant at the Chair of Computer Science 11 – Embedded Software at RWTH Aachen University with the focus on model-based testing of control systems in industry.

He is currently a guest researcher with the Department of Signals and Systems at Chalmers University of Technology for the period of August 2018 to January 2019.