A Heuristic Approach for Constructing Ternary Covering Arrays Using Trinomial Coefficients

A Branch and Bound Algorithm for Ternary Covering Arrays Construction Using Trinomial Coefficients

A ternary covering array (CA(N ; t, k, 3)) is an N × k array with entries from the set {0, 1, 2} where every N × t subarray contains each of the 3 combinations at least once. Here, t is called the strength, k the degree or number of factors, and the alphabet is set to 3. Covering arrays (CAs) are combinatorial designs that have applications in experimental designs and they have been proved to b...

Using Grid Computing for Constructing Ternary Covering Arrays

Using the Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm to Generate the Minimum Test Suite in Covering Array with Uniform Strength

Up to now, several useful algorithms have been proposed to generate covering array, which is one of the branches of combinatorial testing. The main challenge in generating such arrays is generation of the arrays with a minimum number of test cases (for efficiency) at a proper time (for performance), for large systems. Covering array generation strategies are often divided into two general categ...

New Bounds for Ternary Covering Arrays Using a Parallel Simulated Annealing

A covering array CA is a combinatorial structure specified as a matrix of N rows and k columns over an alphabet on v symbols such that for each set of t columns every t-tuple of symbols is covered at least once. Given the values of t, k, and v, the optimal covering array construction problem CAC consists in constructing a CA N; t, k, v with the minimum possible value of N. There are several rep...

Refining the In-Parameter-Order Strategy for Constructing Covering Arrays

Covering arrays are structures for well-representing extremely large input spaces and are used to efficiently implement blackbox testing for software and hardware. This paper proposes refinements over the In-Parameter-Order strategy (for arbitrary t). When constructing homogeneous-alphabet covering arrays, these refinements reduce runtime in nearly all cases by a factor of more than 5 and in so...