Integrating Safety Certification Into Model-Based Testing of Safety-Critical Systems

Testing plays an important role in assuring the safety of safety-critical systems (SCS). Testing SCSs should include tasks to test how the system operates in the presence of failures. With the increase of autonomous, sensing-based functionality in safety-critical systems, efficient and cost-effective testing that maximizes safety evidences has become increasingly challenging. A previously proposed framework for testing safety-critical systems called Model-Combinatorial based testing (MCbt) has the potential for addressing these challenges. MCbt is a framework that proposes an integration of model-based testing, fault analysis, and combinatorial testing to produce the maximum number of evidences for an efficient safety certification process but was never actually used to derive a specific testing approach. In this paper, we present a concrete application of MCbt with an application to a case study. The validation showed that MCbt is more efficient and produces more safety evidences compared to state-of-the-art testing approaches.