Hardware -in-the-Loop Search –Based Testing Approach to Embedded Systems

The complexity of embedded systems is ever increasing while high system quality is being demanded at the same time. With the continuously growing software and system complexity in electronic control units and shortening release cycles, the need for efficient testing grows. In order to perform testing of electronic control units in practice search-based hardware-in-the-loop test environments are used to run the system under test in a simulation environment under real-time conditions. The potential of applying search-based testing approach to the functional testing has been demonstrated in various test cases. The focus was mainly on simulating the system under test in order to evaluate test cases. However, in many cases only the final hardware unit is available for testing. This paper present an approach in which evolutionary functional testing is performed using an actual electronic control unit for test case evaluation. An extensive case study has been carried out to access its capabilities. We demonstrate the use of evolutionary testing for functional testing in an industrial setting by applying the developed solution to test functioning of serial production of an automation-system electronic control unit.