STCG: State-Aware Test Case Generation for Simulink Models

Simulink has been widely used in system design, which supports the efficient modeling and synthesis of embedded controllers, with automatic test case generation to simulate and validate the correctness of the constructed Simulink model. However, the increasing complexity of the model, especially the internal states, brings extra challenges to existing model testing techniques such as constraint solving and random search, which results in difficulties when trying to reach the deeper logic of the model effectively.

In this paper, we propose STCG, a state-aware test case generation method for Simulink models. STCG solves only one iteration of the model each time to get the test input that can cover a target branch, then executes the model once to obtain and update the novel model state based on the solved input dynamically. Then, it solves the remaining branches based on the new model state iteratively until all the coverage requirements are satisfied. We implemented STCG and evaluated it on several benchmark Simulink models. Compared to the built-in Simulink Design Verifier and state-of-the-art academic work SimCoTest, STCG achieves an average improvement of 58% and 132% on Decision Coverage, 52% and 70% on Condition Coverage and 239% and 237% on Modified Condition Decision Coverage, respectively.