Applying Combinatorial Testing to High-Speed Railway Automatic Train Protection System

The onboard Automatic Train Protection System (ATP) is one of the key components of the Chinese high-speed railway train control system. ATP is a safety-critical system since a failure of ATP could result in serious accidents. This paper reports a combinatorial testing practice performed in testing one of the major ATP functions, i.e. Balise Information Processing (BIP). We created one input model for each of the total 7 application scenarios of BIP. We generated a total of 178 pair-wise tests using the ACTS tool. We executed all these 178 tests, among which 172 tests passed and 6 tests failed. We found a total of 5 new faults, including 2 critical faults, and 3 major faults. We believe that combinatorial testing can be a very effective approach to testing large and complex real-world systems such as ATP.