A LabVIEW Metamodel for Automated Analysis

LabVIEW is a graphical environment used by hundreds of thousands of practitioners for developing applications that require fast access to hardware and test data. However, there is limited support for analyzing the LabVIEW models developed by its users, who are mainly traditional system engineers and may not be familiar with existing software engineering techniques. Large LabVIEW models often contain many loops and wires, which makes it very challenging to understand and manually analyze such models. This paper presents an extensible open-source metamodel for design analysis that captures essential relationships across elements in a LabVIEW BlockDiagram. The metamodel has been evaluated on several existing GitHub LabVIEW projects and it has been shown to capture all the dependencies and relationships in the models present in the projects. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the metamodel in integrating LabVIEW with common model management tools.