A new approach to model-based test case generation for industrial automation systems

In recent years, model-based testing (MBT) of automation systems has gained in importance. However, increasing size and complexity of manufacturing plants also lead to larger models, which again cost time and manpower for modeling tasks. An approach to solve this problem is to subdivide the overall model into several separated models of usual components of automation systems which are reusable. Therefore, we introduce the Synchronized Depth First Search (SDFS), which uses a sub-divided automaton model to generate test cases. The underlying automaton model needs to incorporate synchronous transitions in order to synchronize processes among each other and thus forming an overall model to test with.