Falsification of Cyber-Physical Systems Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid development of software and distributed computing, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are widely adopted in many application areas, e.g., smart grid, autonomous automobile. It is difficult to detect defects in CPS models due to the complexities involved in the software and physical systems. To find defects in CPS models efficiently, robustness guided falsification of CPS is introduced. Existing methods use several optimization techniques to generate counterexamples, which falsify the given properties of a CPS. However those methods may require a large number of simulation runs to find the counterexample and is far from practical. In this work, we explore state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques to reduce the number of simulation runs required to find such counterexamples. We report our method and the preliminary evaluation results.

Causality-Aided Falsification

Falsification is drawing attention in quality assurance of heterogeneous systems whose complexities are beyond most verification techniques' scalability. In this paper we introduce the idea of causality aid in falsification: by providing a falsification solver -- that relies on stochastic optimization of a certain cost function -- with suitable causal information expressed by a Bayesian network, search for a falsifying input value can be efficient. Our experiment results show the idea's viability.