Analyzing Industrial Simulink Models by Statistical Model Checking

The evolution of automotive systems has been rapid. Nowadays, electronic brains control dozens of functions in vehicles, like braking, cruising, etc. Model-based design approaches, in environments such as MATLAB Simulink, seem to help in addressing the ever-increasing need to enhance quality, and manage complexity, by supporting functional design from predefined block libraries, which can be simulated and analyzed for hidden errors, but also used for code generation. For this reason, providing assurance that Simulink models fulfill given functional and timing requirements is desirable. In this paper, we propose a pattern-based, execution-order preserving automatic transformation of Simulink atomic and composite blocks into stochastic timed automata that can then be analyzed formally with UPPAAL Statistical Model Checker (UPPPAAL SMC). Our method is supported by the tool SIMPPAAL, which we also introduce and apply on an industrial prototype called the Brake-by-Wire system. This work enables the formal analysis of industrial Simulink models, by automatically generating their semantic counterpart.