Elevators are among the oldest and most widespread transportation systems, yet their complexity increases rapidly to satisfy customization demands and to meet quality of service requirements. Verification and validation tasks in this context are costly, since they rely on the manual intervention of domain experts at some points of the process. This is mainly due to the difficulty to assess whether the elevators behave as expected in the different test scenarios, the so-called test oracle problem. Metamorphic testing is a thriving testing technique that alleviates the oracle problem by reasoning on the relations among multiple executions of the system under test, the so-called metamorphic relations. In this practical experience paper, we report on the application of metamorphic testing to verify an industrial elevator dispatcher. Together with domain experts from the elevation sector, we defined multiple metamorphic relations that consider domain-specific quality of service measures. Evaluation results with seeded faults show that the approach is effective at detecting faults automatically.
The software of elevators requires maintenance over several years to deal with new functionality, correction of bugs or legislation changes. To automatically validate this software, test oracles are necessary. A typical approach in industry is to use regression oracles. These oracles have to execute the test input both, in the software version under test and in a previous software version. This practice has several issues when using simulation to test elevators dispatching algorithms at system level. These issues include a long test execution time and the impossibility of re-using test oracles both at different test levels and in operation. To deal with these issues, we propose DARIO, a test oracle that relies on regression learning algorithms to predict the Qualify of Service of the system. The regression learning algorithms of this oracle are trained by using data from previously tested versions. An empirical evaluation with an industrial case study demonstrates the feasibility of using our approach in practice. A total of five regression learning algorithms were validated, showing that the regression tree algorithm performed best. For the regression tree algorithm, the accuracy when predicting verdicts by DARIO ranged between 79 to 87%.
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