Industrial Survey on Robustness Testing In Cyber Physical Systems

A research team from the University of Namur has published a comprehensive industrial survey examining robustness testing practices for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) across multiple critical sectors. The CARAPACE survey, conducted in Wallonia's industrial landscape, investigates how organizations in manufacturing, energy, transportation, and healthcare approach system robustness from requirements engineering through test execution. The study reveals that while CPS failures can have severe economic and safety implications, current industry practices show significant divergence from academic state-of-the-art methodologies, creating vulnerability gaps in systems responsible for automation and real-time decision-making.

The survey methodology systematically analyzed robustness understanding across five key dimensions: requirements engineering, system design, test execution, failure modes, and available tooling. Researchers compared their findings against similar industrial surveys in the literature, identifying persistent challenges that span organizational and technical domains. The paper, available on arXiv as submission 2603.04587, provides concrete data on how industries operationalize robustness concepts versus theoretical best practices, offering a roadmap for bridging the implementation gap in safety-critical systems where traditional software testing approaches prove insufficient for integrated hardware-software environments.