A Process for Sound Conformance Testing of Cyber-Physical Systems

We present a process for sound conformance testing of cyber-physical systems, which involves functional but also non-functional aspects. The process starts with a hybrid model of cyber-physical systems in which the correct behavior of the system (at its interface level) is specified. Such a model captures both discrete behavior and evolution of continuous dynamics of the system in time. Since conformance testing inherently involves comparing continuous dynamics, the key parameters of the process are (1) the conformance bounds defining when two signals are sufficiently close to each other, and (2) the permitted error margin in the conformance analysis introduced by sampling of continuous signals. The final parameter of this process is (3) finding (and adjusting) the sampling rate of the dynamic behavior. In the specified process, we provide different alternatives for fixing the error margin of the conformance testing if the sampling rate is fixed, establishing the sampling rate if the error margin is fixed and finding conformance bounds once the sampling rate and the error margin are fixed.