Papers for
industrial software developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Software agents revive broken programs and rebuild complex systems
From Dead Code and Static Requirements to Working Engines: Software Revival with Coding Agents
Abstract: Can coding agents restore software that no longer runs while preserving its underlying methods, and reconstruct industrial software engines from open specifications? Here we introduce ReviveBench, a benchmark with two task families evaluated by hidden verifiers calibrated against native execution environments, established engineering tools, or purpose-built reference implementations. The revival family comprises ten tasks involving dependency incompatibilities, deleted core modules, legacy builds, and a GPU-based foundation model. Every starting workspace fails verification, and the strongest evaluated model passes all ten tasks in at least one run each. In contamination-control experiments, identifier obfuscation reduces line similarity to the original implementations from 0.51--0.96 to 0.03--0.44 without reducing the observed pass rate of any evaluated model. On repositories created after the stated knowledge cutoffs, the strongest model passes eight of nine runs. The reconstruction family comprises thirteen tasks spanning numerical, geometric, hardware, and transactional systems (e.g. CAD and CRM). Two models meet the benchmark's pass criteria on all thirteen, although our audit shows that the CFD task cannot establish numerical-solver capability. Benchmark construction and auditing uncover 28 verifier defects, including 24 false negatives and two false positives. These findings show that executable verification can itself introduce substantial measurement error. We present three practical checks: test whether prescribed methods can reach the grading thresholds, investigate agreement among independently generated candidates, and recompute diagnostics from submitted artifacts. ReviveBench thus provides both an evaluation of software revival and engine reconstruction, and cases in validating the verifiers used to measure coding agents for software design.
Apex system helps build flexible production schedules with agent support
APEX: An Extensible Model for Agent-Assisted Production Scheduling
Abstract: Production scheduling requires realistic models that reflect operational constraints and efficient methods that balance competing goals. Putting these methods into use also requires data integration, model adaptation and specialist expertise. We present APEX, an extensible production scheduling framework built around a general model and hybrid multiobjective search. Agent assistance supports both scheduling and model refinement: agents prepare data and explore scenarios in natural language, while coding agents help implement and test new constraints and objectives. Shared construction and checking procedures connect these adaptations to the scheduling core. We benchmark eight APEX configurations against NSGA-II, SPEA2, MOEA/D and SMS-EMOA on 69 public job-shop, flexible job-shop and permutation flow-shop instances, assessing workload completion time (makespan), total job flowtime and computation time. Hybrid configurations achieve the best aggregate solution quality, although the leading method depends on the problem class and objective. A separate synthetic workflow study uses OpenAI's GPT-6-astra as an interaction layer between the human planner and the algorithmic core, testing rule additions, plan and objective changes, and what-if comparisons. All 24 sessions completed the requested changes and passed independent checks of saved models and schedules. A separate coding evaluation produced six native implementations of an additional objective or hard constraint through predefined extension hooks. All passed independent checks without modifying the core.
DJPlus reduces redundant test steps for faster system testing
DJPlus: Generating minimal test suites for strong coverage criteria in graph models
Abstract: Automated test generation from graph models is essential to model-based testing. In this type of testing, graph coverage ensures test suite strength but also results in long test cases that take time to execute on the system under test. We propose a novel optimization-driven method, DJPlus, which generates reduced test suites while satisfying given graph-based test requirements. We implement DJPlus and show the feasibility of edge-pair criterion, a stronger coverage criterion than vertex or edge criteria, on four realistic systems, while prime path criterion poses scalability issues. Our evaluation reveals that the alternative methods generate 2 to 26 times more redundant test steps than DJPlus and DJPlus decreases test execution times by reducing the number of test steps. These results show that DJPlus is a positive step towards tackling the challenges of model-based testing at an industrial scale.