A Testing Pattern for Automatic Control Software Addressing Different Degrees of Process Autonomy and Cooperation

This article considers different automatic control paradigms allowing for varying degrees of agent cooperation and autonomy. In order to support the automatic verification of safety-relevant software controllers, it proposes the use of a generic testing pattern which can be instantiated such as to allow to optimize automatic test data generation with respect to the specific targets of the application considered and of the testing phase involved. The article reports on successful case studies carried out in different real-world environments.