Lower bound and construction of mixed-level locating arrays
E. Chen, Zongfeng Qi, Yu Tang · Communication in Statistics- Theory and Methods · 2020
Covering arrays and locating arrays have been investigated in depth in various scenarios. Test suites based on locating arrays can not only test the presence of system defects, but also identify effects that cause failure according to outcomes. In this article, we first obtain a refined lower bound of test numbers for mixed-level locating arrays, which serves as a benchmark for constructing optimal locating arrays with specific parameters. We also provide an algorithm to construct mixed-level locating arrays aiming to reaching the lower bound. The goal to find a mixed-level locating array is transformed into solving an optimization problem. A simulated annealing algorithm is implemented to approximate a global solution. As a result, a series of mixed-level locating arrays are obtained, which shows that the proposed algorithm is quite effective.