Applying Modular Decomposition in Simulink

Jaskolka, Monika; Scott, Stephen L.; Pantelic, Vera; Wassyng, Alan; Lawford, Mark

doi:10.1109/issrew51248.2020.00033

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…While Simulink started as a tool mainly for modeling and simulating single controllers, today, it can describe large systems comprising thousands of blocks communicating over signals (Boll et al 2021). This increasing complexity has triggered research on properly structuring largescale Simulink models by adopting well-known software design principles (Dajsuren et al 2013;Dajsuren 2015;Jaskolka, Scott, et al 2020;Pantelic et al 2017;Whalen et al 2014). Current studies revolve around hierarchical decomposition, encapsulation, and information hiding, aiming at classical quality attributes such as modularity, coupling, and cohesion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulink bus usage in practice: an empirical study.

Amorim¹,

Boll²,

Bachman³

et al. 2023

JOT

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Matlab/Simulink is a graphical modeling environment that has become the de facto standard for the industrial model-based development of embedded systems. Practitioners employ different structuring mechanisms to manage Simulink models' growing size and complexity. One important architectural element is the so-called bus, which can combine multiple signals into composite ones, thus, reducing a model's visual complexity. However, when and how to effectively use buses is a non-trivial design problem with several trade-offs. To date, only little guidance exists, often applied in an ad-hoc and subjective manner, leading to suboptimal designs. Using an inductive-deductive research approach, we conducted an exploratory survey among Simulink practitioners and extracted bus usage information from a corpus comprising 433 open-source Simulink models.We elicited 22 hypotheses on bus usage advantages, disadvantages, and best practices from the data, whose validity was later tested through a confirmatory survey. Our findings serve as requirements for static analysis tools and pave the way toward guidelines on bus usage in Simulink.

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