Mutation Patterns for Temporal Requirements of Reactive Systems

The paper studies application of mutation analysis for validation of behavioral requirements for reactive systems. The novelty of the approach is that the suggested mutations are semantic-based and applied to natural language description of requirements. This allows to focus only on plausible potential faults and to avoid generation of mutants that are irrelevant to the intended meaning of requirements. In many cases the effect of semantic-based mutations just can't be reached by usual syntax-based mutation of LTL (Linear Temporal Logic) formulas associated with requirements. To make this approach feasible, it is applied to various types of requirements patterns that was presented, so that mutants are themselves patterns. Formalization of patterns and their mutants in LTL enables their use for test generation, for test adequacy evaluation, and for synthesis of monitors used in run-time verification.