2024/05/03 by Heiko Koziolek, Koziolek, Heiko, Virendra Ashiwal +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Real-time simulation and control systems #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.01874
openalex publication_date 2024/05/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Testing PLC and DCS control logic in industrial automation is laborious and challenging since appropriate test cases are often complex and difficult to formulate. Researchers have previously proposed several automated test case generation approaches for PLC software applying symbolic execution and search-based techniques. Often requiring formal specifications and performing a mechanical analysis of programs, these approaches may uncover specific programming errors but sometimes suffer from state space explosion and cannot process rather informal specifications. We proposed a novel approach for the automatic generation of PLC test cases that queries a Large Language Model (LLM) to synthesize test cases for code provided in a prompt. Experiments with ten open-source function blocks from the OSCAT automation library showed that the approach is fast, easy to use, and can yield test cases with high statement coverage for low-to-medium complex programs. However, we also found that LLM-generated test cases suffer from erroneous assertions in many cases, which still require manual adaption.