On-the-Fly Translation and Execution of OCL-Like Queries on Simulink Models

MATLAB/Simulink is a tool for dynamic system modelling widely used across industries such as aerospace and automotive. Model management languages such as OCL, ATL and the languages of the Epsilon platform enable the validation, model-to-model, model-to-text transformation of models but tend to focus on the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF), a de facto standard for domain specific modelling. As Simulink models are built on an entirely different technical stack, the current solution to manipulate them using such languages requires their transformation into an EMF-compatible representation. This approach is expensive as (a) the cost of the transformation can be crippling for large models, (b) it requires the synchronisation of the native Simulink model and its EMF counterpart, and (c) the EMF-representation may be an incomplete copy of the model potentially hampering model management operations. In this paper we propose an alternative approach that uses the MATLAB API to bridge Simulink models with existing model management languages that relies on the "on-the-fly" translation of model management language constructs into MATLAB/Simulink commands. Our approach not only eliminates the cost of the transformation and of the co-evolution of the EMF-compatible representation but also enables full access to all the aspects of Simulink models. We evaluate the performance of both approaches using a set of model validation constraints executed on a sample of the largest Simulink models available on GitHub. Our evaluation suggests that the on-the-fly translation approach can reduce the model validation time by up to 80%.