An empirical investigation of simulated annealing applied to property-oriented testing

Summary form only given. Property-oriented testing uses the specification of a property to drive the testing process. Our aim is to validate a program with respect to a target property, that is to exercise the program and observe whether the property\´s violated or not. We define a test strategy for safety properties in cyclic control systems. It consists of the stepwise construction of test scenarios. Each step explores possible continuations of the dangerous scenarios found at the previous step, using black-box sampling techniques. Here, emphasis is put on using a heuristic search technique - namely, simulated annealing - an automatic way to ample over the input pace. Empirical investigation is conducted on a steam boiler case study. The target property is the "non explosion" of the boiler in presence of faults in the physical devices. The experimental results lead us to propose a revised version of the basic simulated annealing algorithm, whose efficiency is promising.