Breesse

Abstract

Both the Eclipse platform and MathWorks have successfully provided entire ecosystems and tooling for Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). On the one hand, the Eclipse community has built a rich set of open source tools and applications to address different MDE needs. Several of these tools and applications are actively used for developing academic and industrial systems. On the other hand, MathWorks with its Simulink and Stateflow technologies has focused on design modelling, simulation and code generation to deliver one of the most widely used modelling frameworks for developing embedded and safety-critical systems. Leveraging these two MDE ecosystems in the form of an integrated environment for embedded and safety-critical system development would be expected. Nonetheless, these two ecosystems rarely interact due to MathWorks' closed nature and proprietary file formats.This paper presents Breesse, a live bridge for the Eclipse Modeling Framework ecosystem and the MathWorks Simulink and Stateflow ecosystem. Breesse is an open source tool that was built in response to the needs of two industry partners who develop avionics systems. It was realized with EMF technologies and the MATLAB Engine API for Java. Breesse is able to import the contents of Simulink and Stateflow design models and libraries into EMF-based Simulink and Stateflow representations. These EMF-based representations enable the manipulation of the design models in other existing EMF-based tools for MDE. Evaluation of the tool was carried out through its use in three avionics system designs.