Locating Error Interactions Based on Partial Covering Array

Combinatorial testing is practical and effective method to detect the faults triggered by the interactions among parameters or components in the system.It is a key problem that how to locate the faulty interactions after some faults were detected in the test stages.Error locating arrays(ELAs) were defined by Martinez C et al for detecting and locating the faulty interactions in a system.In this paper,the authors prove that a special partial covering array(PCA) is also a special error locating array and study the upper bound of PCA's size.It is obtained that the number of tests given by PCAs is polynomial in logk and d,where k is the number of parameters and d is the number of faulty interactions in the system.Furthermore the authors propose the greedy algorithms to generate the special PCAs,and these algorithms are also a non-adaptive algorithm of producing ELAs.The experimental results show the above approach for detecting and locating the faulty interactions using PCAs is effective.