A concept for PLC hardware-in-the-loop testing using an extension of structured text

Thönnessen, David; Reinker, Niklas; Rakel, Stefan; Kowalewski, Stefan

doi:10.1109/etfa.2017.8247580

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…We use the HiL testing framework as presented in [5], [9], [10] to apply test cases to a SUT. HiL testing allows incorporating the control hardware into the testing process, which is beneficial for safety testing as it incorporates more components of the control system than other approaches like Model-in-the-Loop or Software-in-the-Loop.…”

Section: Test Case Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…HiL testing allows incorporating the control hardware into the testing process, which is beneficial for safety testing as it incorporates more components of the control system than other approaches like Model-in-the-Loop or Software-in-the-Loop. The testing framework includes an oracle which comes with an IOCO based analysis [8], [21], comparing the actual behavior of the SUT against a given specification; refer to [5] for more details. In the context of this paper, the details of the HiL testing framework are not important.…”

Section: Test Case Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The acceptance criterion is that the simplified and actual safety code behave the same modulo small timing differences. The HiL testing framework [5] provides an oracle that checks this acceptance criterion.…”

Section: Use Casementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Virtual commissioning is one method of testing industrial controllers before setting them into operation [1], [2]. In previous work, we specialized Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) [3], [4] simulation to testing of PLCs [5]. This work applies our approach to safety controllers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper describes how test cases are generated and executed. Test results are evaluated using the framework previously described in [5]. In this framework, test cases are evaluated using an oracle, which carries out the evaluation following an Input-Output Conformance (IOCO)-based approach [8], that is, having acceptance criteria that calculate reference signals for a SUT and a so-called supervisor that compares these signals with the actual signals of the SUT [9], [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Testing Safety PLCs Using QuickCheck

Thönnessen

Smallbone

Fabian

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 15th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)

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The testing of safety-related industrial systems is usually carried out by means of checklists. A tester has a list of scenarios that he or she manually applies to the system to check whether the system behaves according to its specification. However, operators behave unpredictably. Their behavior may not be covered by the set of scenarios tested and may lead to dangerous situations. To avoid this, randomized test case generation can be useful as it allows for unanticipated scenarios. The presented framework uses a tool for randomized test case generation, QuickCheck, to trigger event sequences that are then applied to a Safety Programmable Logic Controller (Safety PLC). Experiments show that this concept is capable of finding errors in safety code or increasing the tester's confidence in the correctness of the code by exhibiting a large number of passing test cases. While this concept proves to be powerful, it does not require much effort from the tester as the execution of test cases is done without user interaction.

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Section: Test Case Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%