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Clone detection in MATLAB Stateflow models

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Abstract

MATLAB Simulink is one of the leading tools for model-based software development in the automotive industry. One extension to Simulink is Stateflow, which allows the user to embed Statecharts as components in a Simulink model. These state machines contain nested states, an action language that describes events, guards, conditions, actions, and complex transitions. As Stateflow has become increasingly important in Simulink models for the automotive sector, we extend previous work on clone detection of Simulink models to Stateflow components. While Stateflow models are stored in the same file as the Simulink models that host them, the representations differ. Our approach incorporates a pretransformation that converts the Stateflow models into a form that allows us to use the SIMONE model clone detector to identify candidates and cluster them into classes. In addition, we push the results of the Stateflow clone detection back into the Simulink models, improving the accuracy of the clones found in the host Simulink models. We validated our approach on the MATLAB Simulink/Stateflow demo set. Our approach showed promising results on the identification of Stateflow clones in isolation, as well as integrated components of the Simulink models that are hosting them.

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Notes

  1. www.mathworks.com/products/simulink.

  2. www.mathworks.com/products/stateflow.

  3. www.necsis.ca.

  4. www.mathworks.com/products/matlab.

  5. They come with MATLAB installation located at the MATLAB installation directory.

  6. http://www.conqat.org.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge funding from Network for the Engineering of Complex Software-Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems (NECSIS), the Ontario Research Fund (ORF), and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

    Jian Chen & Manar H. Alalfi

  2. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

    Thomas R. Dean

Authors
  1. Jian Chen
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  2. Thomas R. Dean
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  3. Manar H. Alalfi
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Correspondence to Thomas R. Dean.

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Chen, J., Dean, T.R. & Alalfi, M.H. Clone detection in MATLAB Stateflow models. Software Qual J 24, 917–946 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-015-9296-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-015-9296-0

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