Evolutionary Testing of Embedded Systems

Testing is the most important analytical quality assurance measure for embedded systems. Test case design is the decisive testing activity for the quality of the test. Until now it has not been possible to automate test case design for common function-oriented and structure-oriented test procedures. This causes test case design to be fault-prone and cost-intensive. The evolutionary test is a new, promising approach for the automation of test case design. Evolutionary tests can be used to automate both the testing of functional and non-functional properties. For this purpose the respective test goal is transformed into an optimization problem which is solved by means of meta-heuristic search techniques. The definition of the fitness function is decisive. This chapter presents the fitness functions for testing the temporal behavior of systems, for the execution of safety tests, and for structure tests. Experiments performed demonstrate the effectiveness of the evolutionary test.