A Systematic Approach on Modeling Refinement and Regression Testing of Real-Time Distributed Systems

Abstract

Industry 4.0 aims at highly flexible and digitized model of industrial production. This requires vertical integration of different operations in the manufacturing process to promote reconfigurability and better collaboration between distributed components (Modularity & Integrability) and to handle growing complexity in manufacturing systems. On the other hand, the flexibility of reconfiguration leads to new challenges for the testing process (i.e Diagnosability). It has now become a priority to quality assurance team to ensure that reconfiguration did not introduce any new faults, often referred to as Regression Testing. In this paper, we present a testing framework for real-time distributed manufacturing systems to verify reconfiguration correctness and to generate tests for its implementation testing. We present a systematic modeling refinement approach where several refinements (reconfigurations) can be modelled separately from an abstract model and composed with it. We use the reconfiguration model derived by refinements to demonstrate distributed regression testing by partitioning it into a set of distributed communicating testers making model based testing for manufacturing automation systems scalable.