Combinatorial Methods for Enhancing the Resilience of Production Facilities

Published

April 16, 2025

Author(s)

Klaus Kieseberg, Konstantin Gerner, Bernhard Garn, Wolfgang Czerni, David Kuhn, Raghu Kacker

Abstract

In this paper, we apply combinatorial methods to generate crisis scenarios for production facilities with the goal of strengthening their resilience by identifying weaknesses in operational aspects or crisis response plans, extending previous work from the domain of disaster research. We use notions of combinatorial coverage for quantifying diversity in scenarios and as one objective when sampling the considered scenario space. We report on a small case study targeting the resilience of a production facility. Specifically, we generated covering arrays of different strengths (for five ternary parameters, for strengths two to five) to obtain paths through the production chain and various combinatorial sequence test sets to obtain crisis scenarios (sequence covering arrays for twelve events of strengths two and three as well as sequence test sets with constraints of length six and seven featuring different constraints). Finally, we state reflections as well as practical feedback to the proposed combinatorial approach.

Proceedings Title

2025 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)

Conference Dates

March 31-April 4, 2025

Conference Location

Naples, IT

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW64639.2025.10962469

Local Download

Keywords

combinatorial testing, sequence covering, resilience, production industry, crisis exercises

Citation

Kieseberg, K. , Gerner, K. , Garn, B. , Czerni, W. , Kuhn, D. and Kacker, R. (2025), Combinatorial Methods for Enhancing the Resilience of Production Facilities, 2025 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW), Naples, IT, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW64639.2025.10962469, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=959594 (Accessed March 4, 2026)