SLDG: a metamodel for Simulink/Stateflow models and its applications

Abstract

Simulink and Stateflow (SL/SF) models are being widely used to design and develop embedded systems. Often the SL/SF models of embedded controllers turn out to be large and consist of many subsystems and hierarchies. When such a system is maintained, it becomes difficult to manually analyse the model to identify the impacted elements due to the existence of several explicit and implicit dependencies among the model elements. To automate the analysis of an SL/SF model, we propose a metamodel to capture various types of dependencies existing across the basic blocks. We have named this metamodel Simulink dependency graph (SLDG). We investigate the use of SLDG in change impact visualization and regression test selection. We have developed a prototype tool by implementing our approach for the aforementioned applications.