case study evaluation

Designing and conducting real-world case studies and incident analyses to validate methods on practical systems, compare performance to benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability, scalability, and decision-utility in deployed settings.

casestudyevaluation

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Reasonable Experiments in Model-Based Systems Engineering

Sep 12, 2025
JC
Johan Cederbladh
🏛️ Mälardalen University | Eindhoven University of Technology | Stellenbosch University | IT University of Copenhagen | University of Oslo | Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco | University of Antwerp

In model-based systems engineering, low experimental data reuse efficiency and excessive redundant experiments hinder digital engineering agility. To address this, this paper proposes a case-based reasoning (CBR)-driven experimental management framework that explicitly integrates domain knowledge. The framework features structured experimental metadata modeling, digital twin–enabled scenario semantic alignment, and an interpretable similarity assessment mechanism to intelligently determine whether historical experiments can be transferred to address new verification queries. Its key innovation lies in embedding domain knowledge explicitly into both the CBR retrieval and adaptation stages, thereby enabling trustworthy cross-operating-condition and cross-configuration experimental data reuse. Evaluated on an industrial-scale vehicle energy system design case, the framework reduces redundant experiments by 37% and shortens early verification cycles by 42% on average, significantly enhancing iterative efficiency in digital engineering and advancing intelligent experimental management.

Deciding if existing experiments can answer new engineering questionsIntelligently reusing experiment-related data to avoid redundant experimentsManaging experimental configuration metadata and results efficiently

DrP: Meta's Efficient Investigations Platform at Scale

Dec 03, 2025
SS
Shubham Somani
🏛️ Meta

In large-scale systems, on-call engineers rely on manual procedures or ad-hoc scripts for incident investigation, resulting in high mean time to resolution (MTTR), elevated operational overhead, and diminished productivity. This paper introduces DrP—the first end-to-end automated investigation framework designed for heterogeneous domains including services, AI/ML, and mobile systems. DrP’s key contributions are: (1) a declarative SDK enabling low-code development of reusable, domain-agnostic analysis logic; (2) a distributed execution engine with a plugin-based architecture supporting high-concurrency diagnostics and deep integration with alerting, event management, and remediation systems; and (3) a unified abstraction layer that transparently insulates users from infrastructure heterogeneity. Deployed at scale within Meta, DrP executes ~50,000 analyses daily across 300+ engineering teams, reducing average MTTR by 20% overall and up to 80% in specific scenarios—significantly enhancing SRE responsiveness and system observability.

Automates manual investigation processes to reduce incident resolution timeProvides an end-to-end framework for scalable, automated incident analysis and mitigationReduces on-call toil and improves productivity in large-scale systems

Traditional benchmarks provide only aggregate scores, offering insufficient evidence to support reliable deployment decisions and thereby creating a disconnect between evaluation and action. To address this gap, this work proposes a “deployment-completeness” benchmarking framework, introducing novel metrics—evidence fibers, completeness curves, and certifiable proportions—alongside a systematic audit methodology comprising evidence fiber analysis, response ranking intervals, conformal coverage evaluation, and a certify-then-acquire decision pipeline. Empirical evaluation on benchmarks such as Tox21, Matbench, and JARVIS reveals that conventional approaches suffer a drastic drop in channel coverage to 10.07% under real-world deployment conditions. In contrast, the proposed method reduces error-driven deployment decisions to 0.027% on Tox21 and 0.128% on JARVIS, substantially enhancing deployment reliability.

benchmark evidencecertifiable fractiondeployment action

Existing benchmarks for knowledge work evaluation largely adhere to traditional NLP task paradigms, failing to capture systems’ capabilities in real-world knowledge-intensive settings. This work proposes a three-step framework—explicitly defining work activities, establishing realistic test environments, and focusing evaluation on deliverable outputs—and derives 18 core knowledge work activities from the O*NET database. Innovatively integrating role responsibilities, local tool usage, and downstream usability into benchmark design, the approach establishes a coherent “work activity–test setup–scoring artifact” alignment. Validation through three case studies (GDPval, OfficeQA Pro, and APEX-SWE) exposes critical misalignments in current benchmarks between tasks, environments, and actual work objectives, offering a new paradigm for evaluating knowledge work systems in practical, application-oriented contexts.

benchmark designevaluationknowledge work

Coupled Requirements-Driven Testing of CPS: From Simulation to Reality

Mar 24, 2024
AA
Ankit Agrawal
🏛️ St. Louis University | University of Innsbruck

Safety-critical small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) lack systematic, standardized testing processes that are tightly integrated with safety analysis. Method: This paper proposes a requirement-driven coupled testing framework, introducing the novel triadic paradigm of “requirements–simulation testing–safety analysis.” It employs formal requirement modeling with bidirectional traceability, a simulation–hardware-in-the-loop cooperative testing architecture, scenario-driven test case generation, and deep integration of safety analysis methods (e.g., Fault Tree Analysis and System-Theoretic Process Analysis). Contribution/Results: Evaluated on an sUAS case study, the framework significantly improves simulation fidelity coverage and requirement coverage, enables end-to-end safety evidence generation, fills the gap in standardized sUAS testing procedures, and delivers reproducible, verifiable testing assets to support airworthiness certification.

Cyber-Physical Systems TestingSafety Analysis IntegrationStandardization

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Current evaluations of large language model (LLM) agents for database administration lack production-level fidelity and suffer from inconsistent tasks, platforms, and metrics, hindering meaningful cross-study comparisons. To address this, this work proposes DBA-Bench, a high-fidelity benchmark for database operations that introduces, for the first time, production-grade realism, outcome-oriented evaluation, and controllable scenario replay, covering four critical real-world operational gaps. Built on PostgreSQL instances under active workload, DBA-Bench integrates multi-source time-series and log observations, snapshot rollback, deep annotations, and an automated evaluation framework, encompassing 106 scenarios across seven task categories. In 848 automated runs, the best-performing agent achieved a safety pass rate of only 17.9%, starkly lower than human DBAs’ 93.4%, exposing significant limitations of current approaches in complex, safety-critical repair tasks.

cascading faultscausal diagnosisLLM-based database agents

This study addresses the lack of systematic understanding regarding the implementation and maintenance of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in real-world open-source projects. To bridge this gap, we introduce a transparent, reproducible multi-stage validation pipeline that integrates GitHub REST/GraphQL APIs with custom Python scripts to systematically annotate structural evidence, classify repository roles, and filter out non-functional examples from 3,238 candidate repositories. This process yields a high-quality dataset of 2,297 verified MCP projects, achieving a validation precision of 83% at 95% confidence. Our analysis reveals Python and TypeScript as the dominant implementation languages and identifies hybrid architecture as the most prevalent design pattern, thereby establishing the first large-scale empirical benchmark for MCP ecosystem research.

GitHublarge-scale datasetMCP implementation

This work addresses the lack of systematic evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) in security audit log investigation tasks by introducing AuditBench, the first audit log benchmark specifically designed for attack investigation. AuditBench encompasses over 50 real-world scenarios across Linux and Windows systems and focuses on four core tasks: alert classification, persistence mechanism identification, among others. Through multidimensional experiments, the study systematically evaluates the impact of model scale, log representation, prompt design, and fine-tuning strategies on performance and error patterns, while also analyzing the quality of LLM-generated explanations. The findings reveal the capability boundaries and characteristic failure modes of various models across different investigative tasks, providing empirical foundations for deploying and optimizing LLMs in security operations.

attack investigationsaudit logsincident response

This study addresses a critical gap in current AI evaluation methodologies, which often overlook the impact of low-resource deployment conditions—such as noisy inputs, limited hardware capabilities, and unstable network connectivity—on system usability. The work proposes a novel evaluation framework that treats the deployed system as the unit of assessment, integrating task performance with real-world deployment contexts across multiple dimensions. Departing from conventional leaderboard-based approaches, the framework tailors evaluation criteria to specific application categories and introduces a standardized reporting system comprising benchmark cards, deployment profiles, and failure-handling mechanisms. By balancing comparability with contextual sensitivity, this approach provides policymakers and practitioners with clear, actionable insights for informed AI deployment decisions.

AI evaluationbenchmarkingdeployment conditions

This work addresses the limitation of existing agent evaluation benchmarks, which fail to capture the authentic interaction dynamics between developers and AI agents and inadequately reflect the distribution, diversity, and complexity of real-world tasks. To bridge this gap, the authors introduce a dynamic benchmark constructed from a large-scale corpus of real OpenClaw developer sessions. By leveraging conversation reconstruction, execution environment snapshots, and a deterministic validation mechanism, raw user requests are transformed into reproducible, automatically evaluable tasks. Sampling bias is mitigated through Jensen–Shannon divergence–based control to preserve the true task distribution. The resulting benchmark comprises 281 executable tasks; evaluations of 14 leading models reveal that even the best-performing system solves only 65.8% of them, highlighting a significant capability gap in current agents when operating in realistic software development scenarios.

agent benchmarksdeveloper-agent sessionsreal-world difficulty

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