“Testing Cyber-Physical Systems under Uncertainty: Systematic, Extensible, and Configurable Model-based and Search-based Testing Methodologies” or U-Test, a project proposal by Shaukat Ali and Tao Yue of Simula Research Laboratory was recently awarded funding by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are increasingly used in safety/mission critical domains such as healthcare, handling systems, oil and gas, and maritime industry. CPSs must be reliable, robust, efficient, safe, and secure, even in the presence of uncertainty. Dealing with uncertainty at an acceptable cost is vital to avoid posing undue threats to the system users and the environment. Reliability, robustness, efficiency, safety, and security in CPSs are facets of a more general property often known as “dependability”. Improving system dependability first and foremost relies on the ability to verify and validate CPSs in a cost-effective manner. One way of achieving this is via systematic and automated testing such as Model-based Testing (MBT).

The ideas for U-Test emerged as a result of work done in Certus – specifically from Project 8 “Testing of Real- Time and Embedded Systems”. U-Test will aim to improve dependability of CPSs by defining extensible MBT frameworks supporting holistic testing of the systems under uncertainty in a cost-effective manner through:

1. providing a comprehensive and extensible taxonomy of uncertainties, classifying uncertainties, their properties, and their relationships;
2. creating an Uncertainty Modeling Framework (UMF) to support modeling uncertainties at various levels (relying on exiting modeling/testing standards);
3. defining an intelligent way to evolve uncertainty models developed using UMF towards realistic unknown uncertainty models using search algorithms; and
4. generating cost-effective test cases from uncertainty and evolved models.

U-Test will be an international undertaking, with a consortium encompassing domain experts from various facets of CPSs use: software, embedded systems, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure. Two CPS developers with interesting case studies have been chosen to assess the cost-effectiveness of U-Test: handling systems (ULMA handling systems, Spain); and geo sports (Future Position X, Sweden). The solutions will be integrated into two key commercial tools available on the market: ModelBus/Fokus!MBT (Fraunhofer FOKUS) and Certifylt (Smartesting, France). The CPS test bed will be provided by Nordic Medtest, Sweden. Solutions will also be deployed within logistics, geo sports, and healthcare domains to achieve a wider impact, and facilitate interoperability among tools and technologies. Commercialization aspects of the project will be investigated by Ikerlan (Spain). Overall administration will be managed by Oslo Medtech.

Having sprung from research undertaken in the Certus project, U-Test will be a collaborative effort not only between industry and academia, but between nations.