EFSM-based model-driven approach to concolic testing of system-level design

State-of-art approaches for testing of system-level design of embedded systems generally work at source-code level, thus they require an implementation of the system to be tested. For this reason, they cannot be applied in the context of model-driven design, where code is available only at the end of the design process. Moreover, traditional approaches based on combined concrete and symbolic execution (concolic) suffer two main drawbacks: they are limited in width and depth of the search and not corner-cases oriented. To address such limitations, this paper presents a concolic testing approach for model-driven design of embedded systems. It explores a model of the system, i.e., the extended finite state machine (EFSM), and it relies on weight-oriented analysis of the EFSM transitions, by interleaving long-range concrete approach with symbolic multi-level backjumping strategy. The experimental evaluation on several case studies demonstrates the competitiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves higher transition and instruction coverage than other approaches in significantly reduced time.