Evolution of Model Clones in Simulink

A growing and important area of Model-Based Development (MBD) is model evolution. Despite this, very little research on the evolution of Simulink models has been conducted. This is in contrast to the notable amount of research on UML models, which di↵er significantly from Simulink. Code clones and their evolution across system versions have been used to learn about source-code evolution. We postulate that the same idea can be applied to model clones and model evolution. In this paper, we explore this notion and apply it to Simulink models. We detect model clones in successive versions of MBD projects and, with a new tool, track the evolution of model clones with respect to their containing clone classes. When there is a change in classification of a model-clone, we investigate what specifically evolved in the model to cause this classification change.