Covering Array EXtender

The combinatorial design, known as covering array, has been used mainly to exercise tests for software and hardware components. It has also been used in machine learning applications and the design of experiments for various applications. In this paper, a new approach to construct covering arrays is defined; it is called CAEX (stands for Covering Array EXtender). CAEX approach was tested in the construction of covering arrays of order three and strength two. The CAEX approach's performance was evident by the definition of new upper-bounds in the size of some covering arrays; 34 new upper bounds for covering arrays were defined, remarkably a covering array with 112,770 parameters only requires 50 rows. One important goodness of the CAEX approach is that it can provide the genealogy of each covering array (how each covering arrays was constructed). (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.