Case Study: Aalto University improves factory acceptance testing of control loops with Conformiq MBT

Experiences in Adoption of MBT to Continuous Process Control Applications

The customer, Aalto University, faced a challenge in the factory acceptance testing of distributed control systems, where thousands of control loops had to be tested manually. This process was extremely labor-intensive, requiring around 100 testers to work for weeks, and it was difficult to achieve high test coverage to find hard-to-detect bugs. They partnered with the vendor Conformiq and utilized its Conformiq Designer product for a model-based testing solution.

Conformiq's solution involved creating functional models based on system state machines to automatically generate test cases. This approach, which emphasized model reuse from a template library, was integrated with an automatic test execution framework using JUnit and OPC middleware. The results proved that Conformiq's method could find realistic, single-cycle execution bugs that were often missed by manual testing, significantly improving test quality and reducing manual effort for a system with a massive scale.

Aalto University

Jukka Peltola

Aalto University