Simulated annealing applied to test generation: landscape characterization and stopping criteria

This paper investigates a measurement approach to support the implementation of Simulated Annealing (SA) applied to test generation. SA, like other metaheuristics, is a generic technique that must be tuned to the testing problem under consideration. Finding an adequate setting of SA parameters, that will offer good performance for the target problem, is known to be difficult. Our measurement approach is intended to guide the implementation choices to be made. It builds upon advanced research on how to characterize search problems and the dynamics of metaheuristic techniques applied to them. Central to this research is the concept of landscape. Existing measures of landscape have mainly been applied to combinatorial problems considered in complexity theory. We show that some of these measures can be useful for testing problems as well. The diameter and autocorrelation are retained to study the adequacy of alternative settings of SA parameters. A new measure, the Generation Rate of Better Solutions (GRBS), is introduced to monitor convergence of the search process and implement stopping criteria. The measurement approach is experimented on various case studies, and allows us to successfully revisit a problem issued from our previous work on testing control systems.