A two-stage algorithm for combinatorial testing

Covering arrays are combinatorial structures which have applications in fields like software testing and hardware Trojan detection. In this paper we proposed a two-stage simulated annealing algorithm to construct covering arrays. The proposed algorithm is instanced in this paper through the construction of ternary covering arrays of strength three. We were able to get 579 new upper bounds. In order to show the generality of our proposal, we defined a new benchmark composed of 25 instances of MCAs taken from the literature, all instances were improved.