Behavioral Compatibility of Simulink Models for Product Line Maintenance and Evolution
Bernhard Rumpe⋆, Christoph Schulze, Michael von Wenckstern, Jan Oliver Ringert, Peter Manhart · 2015
Embedded software systems, e.g. automotive, robotic or automation systems are highly configurable and consist of many software components being available in different vari-ants and versions. To identify the degree of reusability be-tween these different occurrences of a component, it is nec-essary to determine the functional backward and forward compatibility between them. Based on this information it is possible to identify in which system context a component can be replaced safely by another version, e.g. exchanging an older component, or variant, e.g. introducing new fea-tures, to achieve the same functionality. This paper presents a model checking approach to de-termine behavioral compatibility of Simulink models, ob-tained from different component variants or during evolu-tion. A prototype for automated compatibility checking demonstrates its feasibility. In addition implemented op-timizations make the analysis more efficient, when the com-pared variants or versions are structurally similar. A case study on a driver assistance system provided by Daimler AG shows the effectiveness of the approach to au-tomatically compare Simulink components. 1.