Fuzzy adaptive tuning of a particle swarm optimization algorithm for variable-strength combinatorial test suite generation

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Title

Swarm Intelligence - Volume 3: Applications

Publisher

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

School

School of Engineering / Centre for Communications Engineering Research

RAS ID

45086

Comments

Zamli, K. Z., Ahmed, B. S., Mahmoud, T., & Afzal, W. (2018). Fuzzy adaptive tuning of a particle swarm optimization algorithm for variable-strength combinatorial test suite generation. In Y. Tan (Ed.), Swarm Intelligence - Volume 3: Applications (pp. 639-662). The Institution of Engineering and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1049/PBCE119H_ch22

Abstract

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is an important software testing technique that has seen lots of recent interest. It can reduce the number of test cases needed by considering interactions between combinations of input parameters. Empirical evidence shows that it effectively detects faults, in particular, for highly configurable software systems. In real-world software testing, the input variables may vary in how strongly they interact; variable strength CIT (VS-CIT) can exploit this for higher effectiveness. The generation of variable strength test suites is a non-deterministic polynomialtime (NP) hard computational problem. Research has shown that stochastic population-based algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be efficient compared to alternatives for VS-CIT problems. Nevertheless, they require detailed control for the exploitation and exploration trade-off to avoid premature convergence (i.e., being trapped in local optima) as well as to enhance the solution diversity. Here, we present a new variant of PSO based on Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS), to permit adaptive selection of its global and local search operations. We detail the design of this combined algorithm and evaluate it through experiments on multiple synthetic and benchmark problems. We conclude that fuzzy adaptive selection of global and local search operations is, at least, feasible as it performs only second-best to a discrete variant of PSO, called discrete PSO (DPSO). Concerning obtaining the best mean test suite size, the fuzzy adaptation even outperforms DPSO occasionally. We discuss the reasons behind this performance and outline relevant areas of future work.

DOI

10.1049/PBCE119H_ch22

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