Towards concolic testing for hybrid systems

• Main Authors: KONG, Pingfan, LI, Yi, CHEN, Xiaohong, SUN, Jun, SUN, Meng, WANG, Jingyi
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Hybrid System; Importance Sampling; Ordinary Differential Equation; Path Condition; Symbolic Execution; Computer and Systems Architecture; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4939; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5942/viewcontent/towards_concolic.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Hybrid systems exhibit both continuous and discrete behavior. Analyzing hybrid systems is known to be hard. Inspired by the idea of concolic testing (of programs), we investigate whether we can combine random sampling and symbolic execution in order to effectively verify hybrid systems. We identify a sufficient condition under which such a combination is more effective than random sampling. Furthermore, we analyze different strategies of combining random sampling and symbolic execution and propose an algorithm which allows us to dynamically switch between them so as to reduce the overall cost. Our method has been implemented as a web-based checker named HyChecker. HyChecker has been evaluated with benchmark hybrid systems and a water treatment system in order to test its effectiveness.