Evolutionary approach to coverage testing of IEC 61499 function block applications

The paper addresses the problem of coverage testing of industrial automation software represented in the IEC 61499 standard, one of the recent standards for distributed control system design. Contrary to model-based testing (MBT), the paper focuses on implementation coverage, not model coverage. An approach based on evolutionary algorithms is presented which generates coverage test suites for both basic and composite IEC 61499 function blocks. It employs two third-party tools, FBDK and EvoSuite. The evaluation of the approach was performed on a set of control applications for two lab-scale demonstration plants. Results show that the approach is applicable and shows good performance at least…