Understanding the specific nature and root cause of bugs of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) can help to design better verification and validation (V&V) techniques for these systems such as domain-specific mutants. Hence, we investigate the bugs of open-source CPSs belonging to different domains. Specifically, we analyze 1,151 issues from 14 projects related to drones, automotive, robotics, and Arduino. We apply a hybrid card-sorting procedure to create a taxonomy of CPS bugs, by extending a previously proposed taxonomy specific to the automotive domain. We report a taxonomy featuring 22 root causes, grouped into eight high-level categories. The taxonomy provides an overview of the root causes related to bugs found in open-source CPSs belonging to different domains. Such root causes are related to different components of a CPS, including hardware, interface, configuration, network, data, and application logic. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest that 33.4% of the analyzed bugs are peculiar to CPSs and, consequently, require specific verification and validation solutions.

Link to the original Journal paper: https://www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/abs/pii/S0164121222001315