An Evaluation of Monte Carlo-Based Hyper-Heuristic for Interaction Testing of Industrial Embedded Software Applications

Hyper-heuristic is a new methodology for the adaptive hybridization of meta-heuristic algorithms to derive a general algorithm for solving optimization problems. This work focuses on the selection type of hyper-heuristic, called the Exponential Monte Carlo with Counter (EMCQ). Current implementations rely on the memory-less selection that can be counterproductive as the selected search operator may not (historically) be the best performing operator for the current search instance. Addressing this issue, we propose to integrate the memory into EMCQ for combinatorial t-wise test suite generation using reinforcement learning based on the Q-learning mechanism, called Q-EMCQ. The limited application of combinatorial test generation on industrial programs can impact the use of such techniques as Q-EMCQ. Thus, there is a need to evaluate this kind of approach against relevant industrial software, with a purpose to show the degree of interaction required to cover the code as well as finding faults. We applied Q-EMCQ on 37 real-world industrial programs written in Function Block Diagram (FBD) language, which is used for developing a train control management system at Bombardier Transportation Sweden AB. The results of this study show that Q-EMCQ is an efficient technique for test case generation. Additionally, unlike the t-wise test suite generation, which deals with the minimization problem, we have also subjected Q-EMCQ to a maximization problem involving the general module clustering to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.