Time-aware Test Execution Scheduling for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

The paper "Time-aware Test Execution Scheduling for Cyber-Physical Systems"first appeared in the application track of the 23rd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2017). Testing cyber-physical systems involves the execution of test cases on target-machines equipped with the latest release of a software control system. When testing industrial robots, it is common that the target machines need to share some common resources, e.g., costly hardware devices, and so there is a need to schedule test case execution on the target machines, accounting for these shared resources. With a large number of such tests executed on a regular basis, this scheduling becomes difficult to manage manually. In fact, with manual test execution planning and scheduling, some robots may remain unoccupied for long periods of time and some test cases may not be executed. We introduce TC-Sched, a time-aware method for automated test case execution scheduling. TC-Sched uses Constraint Programming to schedule tests to run on multiple machines constrained by the tests’ access to shared resources, such as measurement or networking devices. We will further discuss challenges and requirements encountered when automating testing for industrial robots.