Applying Dynamic Programming to Test Case Scheduling for Automated Production Systems

In today’s practice, the engineering lifecycle of the manufacturing systems is getting shorter due to frequent requirement changes. Since the manufacturing systems are required to have both – higher availability from a productivity viewpoint and reliability from a safety viewpoint. To check and meet these requirements, quality assurance, typified by testing is one of the significant engineering steps. Though existing test cases can be reused during testing, there also appears a selection problem out of a vast amount of test cases. Especially, it gets more important when the time is extremely limited, e.g. in commissioning and start-up process that is a mandatory process of manufacturing systems or in regression testing. In the previous work, we have presented approaches regarding how to define and determine the utility of test cases. In this paper, we present an efficient test case scheduling approach by applying an optimization algorithm, so called “dynamic programming”. Considering a physical setup time of the mechatronics system within the approach, it becomes more applicable to the practice. Through the numerical experiment results, we also show the superiority and the scalability of the approach in comparison to two different straight-forward scheduling approaches.