Towards Service-Oriented Design of Hybrid Systems Modeled in Simulink

Simulink is widely used in model-driven design.However, the complexity of hybrid systems that are modeled in Simulink limits the applicability of reuse techniques, which impedes cost-efficient design of complex systems. In particular, a systematic use and reuse of complex submodels, e.g. components with varying structure and functionality, is currently not supported. In this paper, we present an approach for service-oriented design in Simulink. The main idea is that we create a modular representation of complex Simulink structures as services with an expressive and formally defined dynamic interface. A dynamic interface captures not only the types of input and output signals but also their discrete and continuous behavior. Our main contribution is threefold: First, we introduce services in Simulink. Second, we transfer the concept of feature modeling to Simulink to express the variability of a service. Third, we introduce the novel concept of hybrid contracts to define the dynamic interface of a service. With our approach, we enable the designer (1) to define hybrid services that are reusable, and (2) to efficiently develop complex hybrid systems from a given set of services. We demonstrate this with a case study of a hybrid temperature control system.