Safety Analysis of CPSs Over-the-air Updates: Test Case Prioritization and Selection

Overview & Synopsis

Over-the-air (OTA) updates for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) allow engineers to modify their software wirelessly. In the automotive domain, they enable manufacturers to update software without physical access to the vehicle. However, OTA updates can generate a large number of possible software configurations. For example, end users may decide whether or not to install any given OTA updates. The combinatorial explosion of these configurations hampers SW testing, a standard practice for detecting errors in CPS. To overcome this limitation, we propose CRISP (CRIticality-based Selection and Prioritization), a novel framework supporting test case prioritization and selection in the context of OTA updates. Our framework leverages test case robustness, i.e., how far they are from violating the system requirements, to drive test case prioritization and selection. It enables engineers to rank test case executions from most to least critical, and to select only the critical test cases relevant to a given OTA update. We evaluated our approach using a representative SW product line consisting of seven different vehicles, 22 driving scenarios, and two software components. We considered 224 tests, requiring 59 hours of execution time. We assessed the effectiveness of CRISP across five OTA updates. We compared our solution with (a) a random test case prioritization and selection algorithm, and (b) AP-DISC, identified as the state-of-the-art solution in a recent empirical study on the subject. Our results show that CRISP outperforms our baselines in finding failure-revealing test cases, and that our selection procedure can be configured to find reasonable and practical tradeoffs among accuracy (percentage of failure-revealing test cases identified) and computational time (time required to find them).