Combinatorial Test Sequence Generation Method Integrated with STPA

The integration of combinatorial testing (CT) with safety requirement analysis remains challenging for complex software systems, particularly when evolving requirements necessitate dynamic updates to test constraints. Traditional CT methods often fail to systematically incorporate safety constraints derived from early-phase requirements, leading to test suites that become obsolete as system specifications change. In this paper, we propose a novel method that embeds system-theoretic process analysis (STPA) into the CT workflow, enabling the automatic derivation and maintenance of safety-aware combinatorial test. Our approach First formalizes STPA-identified unsafe control actions and hazard mitigation rules as refined constraints, then integrated the refined constraints into constraint model to guide incremental test sequence generation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves an effective improvement in test generation efficiency across three representative case studies (robotic control, secure vault system and civil aircraft flight mode transitions), while maintaining compliance with dynamically evolving safety requirements.