arXiv subjects

Hassan Sartaj

Publications and source records attributed to Hassan Sartaj.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Search-Based Software Engineering and AI Foundation Models: Current Landscape and Future Roadmap

Search-based software engineering (SBSE), which integrates metaheuristic search techniques with software engineering, has been an active area of research for about 25 years. It has been applied to solve numerous problems across the entire software engineering lifecycle and has demonstrated its versatility in multiple domains. With recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly the emergence of foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs), the evolution of SBSE alongside these models remains undetermined. In this window of opportunity, we present a research roadmap that articulates the current landscape of SBSE in relation to FMs, identifies open challenges, and outlines potential research directions to advance SBSE through its synergy with FMs. Specifically, we analyze three core aspects: utilizing FMs to enhance SBSE, applying SBSE to advance FMs, and exploring the integration of SBSE and FMs. Furthermore, we present a forward-thinking perspective that envisions the future of SBSE in the era of FMs, highlighting promising research opportunities to address challenges in emerging domains.

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arXiv2026

Foundation Models for Software Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems: the Road Ahead

Foundation Models (FMs), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), are increasingly used to support various software engineering activities (e.g., coding and testing). Their adoption in software engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) is also growing. However, research in this area remains limited. Most existing studies have primarily focused on LLMs, only one type of FM, leaving ample opportunities to explore other FMs, such as vision-language models. We argue that, in addition to LLMs, other FMs utilizing different data modalities (e.g., images, audio) and multimodal models (which integrate multiple modalities) hold great potential for supporting CPS software engineering, given that these systems process diverse data types. To address this, in this first systematic effort, we present a forward-looking research roadmap for integrating FMs into commonly known phases of CPS software engineering, thereby making it accessible to most software engineers. We derive the roadmap from the literature, emerging trends in FMs, and gaps identified from the literature. The roadmap highlights key challenges and actionable research opportunities for the software engineering community to guide future research. Moreover, we discuss the common challenges associated with applying FMs across six dimensions (e.g., technical, economic and resource, and human aspects). This roadmap aims to provide a visionary guide for researchers and practitioners, outlining directions for future work and performing future empirical studies.

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arXiv2026

Search-based Robustness Testing of Laptop Refurbishing Robotic Software

The Danish Technological Institute (DTI) focuses on transferring advanced technologies (including robots) to the industry and the public sector. One key application is laptop refurbishment using specialized robots, aimed at promoting reuse, reducing electronic waste, and supporting the European Circular Economy Action Plan. The software of such robots often includes features that use object detection models to detect objects for various purposes, such as identifying screws for laptop disassembly or detecting stickers to remove them. Ensuring the robustness of such models to small input variations remains a critical challenge, and addressing it is important to avoid potential damage to laptops during refurbishment. In this paper, we propose PROBE, a search-based robustness testing approach that leverages multi-objective optimization to identify minimal, localized perturbations that expose failures in object detection models used in the software of laptop refurbishing robots. PROBE employs NSGA-II to systematically explore the perturbation space, optimizing for failure induction considering both localization and confidence, and perturbation magnitude, while enabling the discovery of diverse failure cases. Results show that PROBE is 3$\times$ to 7$\times$ more effective than random search in generating failure-inducing perturbations, while requiring smaller perturbation magnitudes, and that the generated perturbations transfer across models. We further show that metamorphic relations provide additional insights into model robustness, enabling the assessment of stability even in non-failing cases.

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arXiv2026

Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Robotics: A Research Agenda

Self-adaptive robotic systems operate autonomously in dynamic and uncertain environments, requiring robust real-time monitoring and adaptive behaviour. Unlike traditional robotic software with predefined logic, self-adaptive robots exploit artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and model-driven engineering to adapt continuously to changing conditions, thereby ensuring reliability, safety, and optimal performance. This paper presents a research agenda for software engineering in self-adaptive robotics, structured along two dimensions. The first concerns the software engineering lifecycle, requirements, design, development, testing, and operations, tailored to the challenges of self-adaptive robotics. The second focuses on enabling technologies such as digital twins and AI-driven adaptation, which support runtime monitoring, fault detection, and automated decision-making. We identify open challenges, including verifying adaptive behaviours under uncertainty, balancing trade-offs between adaptability, performance, and safety, and integrating self-adaptation frameworks like MAPE K/MAPLE-K. By consolidating these challenges into a roadmap toward 2030, this work contributes to the foundations of trustworthy and efficient self-adaptive robotic systems capable of meeting the complexities of real-world deployment.

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arXiv2026

Human-in-the-Loop Uncertainty Analysis in Self-Adaptive Robots Using LLMs

Self-adaptive robots operate in dynamic, unpredictable environments where unaddressed uncertainties can lead to safety violations and operational failures. However, systematically identifying and analyzing these uncertainties, including their sources, impacts, and mitigation strategies, remains a significant challenge given the inherent complexity of real-world environments, dynamic robotic behavior, and the rapid evolution of robotic technologies. To address this, we introduce RoboULM, a human-in-the-loop methodology and tool that supports practitioners in systematically exploring uncertainties at the design stage using large language models (LLMs). Moreover, we present an uncertainty taxonomy that provides a detailed catalog of uncertainties in self-adaptive robots. We evaluated RoboULM with 16 practitioners from four industrial use cases. The results show that RoboULM was perceived as both useful and easy to understand, with the participants particularly valuing structured prompting and iterative refinement support. These findings demonstrate the potential of RoboULM as a viable solution for systematic uncertainty analysis in complex robots.

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arXiv2025

Identifying Uncertainty in Self-Adaptive Robotics with Large Language Models

Future self-adaptive robots are expected to operate in highly dynamic environments while effectively managing uncertainties. However, identifying the sources and impacts of uncertainties in such robotic systems and defining appropriate mitigation strategies is challenging due to the inherent complexity of self-adaptive robots and the lack of comprehensive knowledge about the various factors influencing uncertainty. Hence, practitioners often rely on intuition and past experiences from similar systems to address uncertainties. In this article, we evaluate the potential of large language models (LLMs) in enabling a systematic and automated approach to identify uncertainties in self-adaptive robotics throughout the software engineering lifecycle. For this evaluation, we analyzed 10 advanced LLMs with varying capabilities across four industrial-sized robotics case studies, gathering the practitioners' perspectives on the LLM-generated responses related to uncertainties. Results showed that practitioners agreed with 63-88% of the LLM responses and expressed strong interest in the practicality of LLMs for this purpose.

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arXiv2025

Assessing Quantum Extreme Learning Machines for Software Testing in Practice

Machine learning has been extensively applied for classical software testing activities such as test generation, minimization, and prioritization. Along the same lines, there has been interest in applying quantum machine learning to classical software testing. For example, Quantum Extreme Learning Machines (QELMs) were recently applied for testing classical software of industrial elevators. However, studies on QELMs, whether in software testing or other areas, used ideal simulators that fail to account for the noise in current quantum computers. While ideal simulations offer insight into QELM's theoretical capabilities, they do not enable studying their performance on current noisy quantum computers. To this end, we study how quantum noise affects QELM in three industrial classical software testing case studies, providing insights into QELMs' robustness to noise for software testing applications. Such insights assess QELMs potential as a viable solution for software testing problems in today's noisy quantum computing. Our results show that QELMs are significantly affected by quantum noise, with a performance drop of 250% in regression and 50% in classification software testing tasks. Quantum noise also increases uncertainty in QELM models, producing a saturation effect where larger qubit counts make the models increasingly random and unreliable. While error mitigation techniques can enhance noise resilience, achieving an average 3% performance drop in classification, their effectiveness varies by context. For classification tasks, QLEAR performs well, whereas Zero Noise Extrapolation is more effective for regression and smaller qubit counts. However, no single mitigation approach consistently reduces uncertainty across tasks or scales reliably as the number of qubits increases, highlighting the need for QELM-tailored strategies.

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arXiv2025

Out of Distribution Detection in Self-adaptive Robots with AI-powered Digital Twins

Self-adaptive robots (SARs) in complex, uncertain environments must proactively detect and address abnormal behaviors, including out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. To this end, digital twins offer a valuable solution for OOD detection. Thus, we present a digital twin-based approach for OOD detection (ODiSAR) in SARs. ODiSAR uses a Transformer-based digital twin to forecast SAR states and employs reconstruction error and Monte Carlo dropout for uncertainty quantification. By combining reconstruction error with predictive variance, the digital twin effectively detects OOD behaviors, even in previously unseen conditions. The digital twin also includes an explainability layer that links potential OOD to specific SAR states, offering insights for self-adaptation. We evaluated ODiSAR by creating digital twins of two industrial robots: one navigating an office environment, and another performing maritime ship navigation. In both cases, ODiSAR forecasts SAR behaviors (i.e., robot trajectories and vessel motion) and proactively detects OOD events. Our results showed that ODiSAR achieved high detection performance -- up to 98\% AUROC, 96\% TNR@TPR95, and 95\% F1-score -- while providing interpretable insights to support self-adaptation.

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arXiv2025

REST API Testing in DevOps: A Study on an Evolving Healthcare IoT Application

Healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) applications often integrate various third-party healthcare applications and medical devices through REST APIs, resulting in complex and interdependent networks of REST APIs. Oslo City's healthcare department collaborates with various industry partners to develop such healthcare IoT applications enriched with a diverse set of REST APIs. Following the DevOps process, these REST APIs continuously evolve to accommodate evolving needs such as new features, services, and devices. Oslo City's primary goal is to utilize automated solutions for continuous testing of these REST APIs at each evolution stage, thereby ensuring their dependability. Although the literature offers various automated REST API testing tools, their effectiveness in regression testing of the evolving REST APIs of healthcare IoT applications within a DevOps context remains undetermined. This paper evaluates state-of-the-art and well-established REST API testing tools, specifically, RESTest, EvoMaster, Schemathesis, RESTler, and RestTestGen, for the regression testing of a real-world healthcare IoT application, considering failures, faults, coverage, regressions, and cost. We conducted experiments using all accessible REST APIs (17 APIs with 120 endpoints), and 14 releases evolved during DevOps. Overall, all tools generated tests leading to several failures, 18 potential faults, up to 84% coverage, and 23 regressions. Over 70% of tests generated by all tools fail to detect failures, resulting in significant overhead.

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arXiv2025

Digital Twin-based Out-of-Distribution Detection in Autonomous Vessels

An autonomous vessel (AV) is a complex cyber-physical system (CPS) with software enabling many key functionalities, e.g., navigation software enables an AV to autonomously or semi-autonomously follow a path to its destination. Digital twins of such AVs enable advanced functionalities such as running what-if scenarios, performing predictive maintenance, and enabling fault diagnosis. Due to technological improvements, real-time analyses using continuous data from vessels' real-time operations have become increasingly possible. However, the literature has little explored developing advanced analyses in real-time data in AVs with digital twins built with machine learning techniques. To this end, we present a novel digital twin-based approach (ODDIT) to detect future out-of-distribution (OOD) states of an AV before reaching them, enabling proactive intervention. Such states may indicate anomalies requiring attention (e.g., manual correction by the ship master) and assist testers in scenario-centered testing. The digital twin consists of two machine-learning models predicting future vessel states and whether the predicted state will be OOD. We evaluated ODDIT with five vessels across waypoint and zigzag maneuvering under simulated conditions, including sensor and actuator noise and environmental disturbances i.e., ocean current. ODDIT achieved high accuracy in detecting OOD states, with AUROC and TNR@TPR95 scores reaching 99\% across multiple vessels.

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arXiv2025

LLMs in the Heart of Differential Testing: A Case Study on a Medical Rule Engine

The Cancer Registry of Norway (CRN) uses an automated cancer registration support system (CaReSS) to support core cancer registry activities, i.e, data capture, data curation, and producing data products and statistics for various stakeholders. GURI is a core component of CaReSS, which is responsible for validating incoming data with medical rules. Such medical rules are manually implemented by medical experts based on medical standards, regulations, and research. Since large language models (LLMs) have been trained on a large amount of public information, including these documents, they can be employed to generate tests for GURI. Thus, we propose an LLM-based test generation and differential testing approach (LLMeDiff) to test GURI. We experimented with four different LLMs, two medical rule engine implementations, and 58 real medical rules to investigate the hallucination, success, time efficiency, and robustness of the LLMs to generate tests, and these tests' ability to find potential issues in GURI. Our results showed that GPT-3.5 hallucinates the least, is the most successful, and is generally the most robust; however, it has the worst time efficiency. Our differential testing revealed 22 medical rules where implementation inconsistencies were discovered (e.g., regarding handling rule versions). Finally, we provide insights for practitioners and researchers based on the results.

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arXiv2024

MeDeT: Medical Device Digital Twins Creation with Few-shot Meta-learning

Testing healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) applications at system and integration levels necessitates integrating numerous medical devices of various types. Challenges of incorporating medical devices are: (i) their continuous evolution, making it infeasible to include all device variants, and (ii) rigorous testing at scale requires multiple devices and their variants, which is time-intensive, costly, and impractical. Our collaborator, Oslo City's health department, faced these challenges in developing automated test infrastructure, which our research aims to address. In this context, we propose a meta-learning-based approach (MeDeT) to generate digital twins (DTs) of medical devices and adapt DTs to evolving devices. We evaluate MeDeT in OsloCity's context using five widely-used medical devices integrated with a real-world healthcare IoT application. Our evaluation assesses MeDeT's ability to generate and adapt DTs across various devices and versions using different few-shot methods, the fidelity of these DTs, the scalability of operating 1000 DTs concurrently, and the associated time costs. Results show that MeDeT can generate DTs with over 96% fidelity, adapt DTs to different devices and newer versions with reduced time cost (around one minute), and operate 1000 DTs in a scalable manner while maintaining the fidelity level, thus serving in place of physical devices for testing.

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arXiv2024

Uncertainty-Aware Environment Simulation of Medical Devices Digital Twins

Smart medical devices are an integral component of the healthcare Internet of Things (IoT), providing patients with various healthcare services through an IoT-based application. Ensuring the dependability of such applications through system and integration-level testing mandates the physical integration of numerous medical devices, which is costly and impractical. In this context, digital twins of medical devices play an essential role in facilitating testing automation. Testing with digital twins without accounting for uncertain environmental factors of medical devices leaves many functionalities of IoT-based healthcare applications untested. In addition, digital twins operating without environmental factors remain out of sync and uncalibrated with their corresponding devices functioning in the real environment. To deal with these challenges, in this paper, we propose a model-based approach (EnvDT) for modeling and simulating the environment of medical devices' digital twins under uncertainties. We empirically evaluate the EnvDT using three medicine dispensers, Karie, Medido, and Pilly connected to a real-world IoT-based healthcare application. Our evaluation targets analyzing the coverage of environment models and the diversity of uncertain scenarios generated for digital twins. Results show that EnvDT achieves approximately 61% coverage of environment models and generates diverse uncertain scenarios (with a near-maximum diversity value of 0.62) during multiple environmental simulations.

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arXiv2024

Efficient Test Data Generation for MC/DC with OCL and Search

System-level testing of avionics software systems requires compliance with different international safety standards such as DO-178C. An important consideration of the avionics industry is automated test data generation according to the criteria suggested by safety standards. One of the recommended criteria by DO-178C is the modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) criterion. The current model-based test data generation approaches use constraints written in Object Constraint Language (OCL), and apply search techniques to generate test data. These approaches either do not support MC/DC criterion or suffer from performance issues while generating test data for large-scale avionics systems. In this paper, we propose an effective way to automate MC/DC test data generation during model-based testing. We develop a strategy that utilizes case-based reasoning (CBR) and range reduction heuristics designed to solve MC/DC-tailored OCL constraints. We performed an empirical study to compare our proposed strategy for MC/DC test data generation using CBR, range reduction, both CBR and range reduction, with an original search algorithm, and random search. We also empirically compared our strategy with existing constraint-solving approaches. The results show that both CBR and range reduction for MC/DC test data generation outperform the baseline approach. Moreover, the combination of both CBR and range reduction for MC/DC test data generation is an effective approach compared to existing constraint solvers.

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arXiv2024

Automated System-level Testing of Unmanned Aerial Systems

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) rely on various avionics systems that are safety-critical and mission-critical. A major requirement of international safety standards is to perform rigorous system-level testing of avionics software systems. The current industrial practice is to manually create test scenarios, manually/automatically execute these scenarios using simulators, and manually evaluate outcomes. The test scenarios typically consist of setting certain flight or environment conditions and testing the system under test in these settings. The state-of-the-art approaches for this purpose also require manual test scenario development and evaluation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automate the system-level testing of the UAS. The proposed approach (AITester) utilizes model-based testing and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to automatically generate, execute, and evaluate various test scenarios. The test scenarios are generated on the fly, i.e., during test execution based on the environmental context at runtime. The approach is supported by a toolset. We empirically evaluate the proposed approach on two core components of UAS, an autopilot system of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and cockpit display systems (CDS) of the ground control station (GCS). The results show that the AITester effectively generates test scenarios causing deviations from the expected behavior of the UAV autopilot and reveals potential flaws in the GCS-CDS.

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arXiv2024

HITA: An Architecture for System-level Testing of Healthcare IoT Applications

System-level testing of healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) applications requires creating a test infrastructure with integrated medical devices and third-party applications. A significant challenge in creating such test infrastructure is that healthcare IoT applications evolve continuously with the addition of new medical devices from different vendors and new services offered by different third-party organizations following different architectures. Moreover, creating test infrastructure with a large number of different types of medical devices is time-consuming, financially expensive, and practically infeasible. Oslo City's healthcare department faced these challenges while working with various healthcare IoT applications. To address these challenges, this paper presents a real-world test infrastructure software architecture (HITA) designed for healthcare IoT applications. We evaluated HITA's digital twin (DT) generation component implemented using model-based and machine learning (ML) approaches in terms of DT fidelity, scalability, and time cost of generating DTs. Results show that the fidelity of DTs created using model-based and ML approaches reach 94% and 95%, respectively. Results from operating 100 DTs concurrently show that the DT generation component is scalable and ML-based DTs have a higher time cost.

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arXiv2023

Model-based Digital Twins of Medicine Dispensers for Healthcare IoT Applications

Healthcare applications with the Internet of Things (IoT) are often safety-critical, thus, require extensive testing. Such applications are often connected to smart medical devices from various vendors. System-level testing of such applications requires test infrastructures physically integrating medical devices, which is time and monetary-wise expensive. Moreover, applications continuously evolve, e.g., introducing new devices and users and updating software. Nevertheless, a test infrastructure enabling testing with a few devices is insufficient for testing healthcare IoT systems, hence compromising their dependability. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach for the creation and operation of digital twins (DTs) of medicine dispensers as a replacement for physical devices to support the automated testing of IoT applications at scale. We evaluate our approach with an industrial IoT system with medicine dispensers in the context of Oslo City and its industrial partners, providing healthcare services to its residents. We study the fidelity of DTs in terms of their functional similarities with their physical counterparts: medicine dispensers. Results show that the DTs behave more than 92% similar to the physical medicine dispensers, providing a faithful replacement for the dispenser.

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arXiv2023

Cost Reduction on Testing Evolving Cancer Registry System

The Cancer Registration Support System (CaReSS), built by the Cancer Registry of Norway (CRN), is a complex real-world socio-technical software system that undergoes continuous evolution in its implementation. Consequently, continuous testing of CaReSS with automated testing tools is needed such that its dependability is always ensured. Towards automated testing of a key software subsystem of CaReSS, i.e., GURI, we present a real-world application of an extension to the open-source tool EvoMaster, which automatically generates test cases with evolutionary algorithms. We named the extension EvoClass, which enhances EvoMaster with a machine learning classifier to reduce the overall testing cost. This is imperative since testing with EvoMaster involves sending many requests to GURI deployed in different environments, including the production environment, whose performance and functionality could potentially be affected by many requests. The machine learning classifier of EvoClass can predict whether a request generated by EvoMaster will be executed successfully or not; if not, the classifier filters out such requests, consequently reducing the number of requests to be executed on GURI. We evaluated EvoClass on ten GURI versions over four years in three environments: development, testing, and production. Results showed that EvoClass can significantly reduce the testing cost of evolving GURI without reducing testing effectiveness (measured as rule coverage) across all three environments, as compared to the default EvoMaster. Overall, EvoClass achieved ~31% of overall cost reduction. Finally, we report our experiences and lessons learned that are equally valuable for researchers and practitioners.

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