Simulated Annealing for Constructing Mixed Covering Arrays

Combinatorial testing is a method that can reduce costs and increase the effectiveness of software testing for many applications. It is based on constructing test-suites of economical size, which provide coverage of the most prevalent configurations of parameters. Mixed Covering Arrays (MCAs) are combinatorial structures which can be used to represent these test-suites. This paper presents a new Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm for Constructing MCAs. This algorithm incorporates several distinguishing features including an efficient heuristic to generate good quality initial solutions, a compound neighborhood function which carefully combines two designed neighborhoods and a fine-tuned cooling schedule. The experimental evidence showed that our SA algorithm improves the obtained results by other approaches reported in the literature, finding the optimal solution in some of the solved cases.