Automated Control Logic Test Case Generation using Large Language Models

Understand

Testing PLC and DCS control logic in industrial automation is laborious and challenging since appropriate test cases are often complex and difficult to formulate.

• Researchers have previously proposed several automated test case generation approaches for PLC software applying symbolic execution and search-based techniques.
• Often requiring formal specifications and performing a mechanical analysis of programs, these approaches may uncover specific programming errors but sometimes suffer from state space explosion and cannot process rather informal specifications.
• We proposed a novel approach for the automatic generation of PLC test cases that queries a Large Language Model (LLM) to synthesize test cases for code provided in a prompt.