SimPact: Impact Analysis for Simulink Models

With the increasing use of Simulink modeling in embedded system development, there comes a need for effective techniques and tools to support managing these models and their related artifacts. Because maintenance of models makes up such a large portion of the cost and effort of the system as a whole, it is increasingly important to ensure that the process of managing models is as simple, intuitive and efficient as possible. Part of model management comes in the form of impact analysis - the ability to determine the impact of a change to a model on related artifacts such as test cases and other models. This paper presents an approach to impact analysis for Simulink models, and a tool to implement it (SimPact). We validate our tool as an impact predictor against the maintenance history of a large set of industrial models and their tests. The results show a high level of both precision and recall in predicting actual impact of model changes on tests.