Towards Change-Aware Testing of Multi-Domain Cyber-Physical Systems: Challenges and Future Directions

Vehicles are prime examples of cyber-physical systems that rely on multiple domains, including mechanics, electronics, and software. Due to high customizability and software changes introduced by bug fixes or functional upgrades, vehicle instances vary in space (variants) and time (versions). This results in a huge number of possible variants and versions; thus, testing all combinations to ensure functional safety is practically infeasible. Moreover, components of all domains interact with each other; thus, solely focusing on single domains while testing multi-domain cyber-physical systems is insufficient. In this paper, we propose a process for change-aware testing of cyber-physical systems, including test activities we identified during a literature analysis. The process consists of multiple structured steps, including the selection of affected variants, test case selection, and adaptive configuration of test environments. Based on the process and identified activities, we discuss challenges arising from multi-domain dependencies by investigating the limitations of current approaches when testing cyber-physical systems and derive research questions for future work.