Validation of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: An Application to HVAC Systems

We describe a validation approach for Simulink models of industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS), based on an adaptation of a coverage-guided test generation method for hybrid systems. Modelling an industrial CPS requires integrating heterogeneous components, which introduces high complexity in model verification. Using Simulink, which has become a de-facto industrial tool, heterogeneity comes from combining different formalisms (Simulink blocks, Stateflow diagrams, Matlab and C functions, etc.) and mixing different types of dynamics (discrete, continuous). Since the interactions between such components are often too complex to be faithfully captured in an existing mathematical modelling paradigm, we resort to treating them as black box systems while trying to exploit as much as possible a-priori knowledge about them. We first describe our approach: extracting from a Simulink model the information to define the main ingredients of the test generation framework, in particular environment inputs in which faults could be injected and critical states that require good coverage. We then illustrate the approach with an industrial model of an HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) system.