  Mutation testing is an established software quality assurance technique for
the assessment of test suites. While it is well-suited to estimate the general
fault-revealing capability of a test suite, it is not practical and informative
when the software under test must be validated against specific requirements.
This is often the case for embedded software, where the software is typically
validated against rigorously-specified safety properties. In such a scenario
(i) a mutant is relevant only if it can impact the satisfaction of the tested
properties, and (ii) a mutant is meaningfully-killed with respect to a property
only if it causes the violation of that property. To address these limitations
of mutation testing, we introduce property-based mutation testing, a method for
assessing the capability of a test suite to exercise the software with respect
to a given property. We evaluate our property-based mutation testing framework
on Simulink models of safety-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) from the
automotive and avionic domains and demonstrate how property-based mutation
testing is more informative than regular mutation testing. These results open
new perspectives in both mutation testing and test case generation of CPS.
