Transfer Function Generation for Model Abstraction Using Static Analysis

Currently, Model Based Development (MBD) is the de-facto methodology in automotive industry. This has led to conversions of legacy code to Simulink models. Our previous work was related to implementing the C2M tool to automatically convert legacy code to Simulink models. While the tool has been implemented and deployed on few OEM pilot code-sets there were several improvement areas identified w.r.t. the generated models. One of the improvement areas identified was that the generated model used atomic blocks instead of abstracted blocks available in Simulink. E.g. the generated model used an ADD block and feedback loop to represent an integration operation instead of using an integrator block directly. This reduced the readability of the model even though the functionality was correct. Thus, as a user of the model, an engineer would like to see abstract blocks rather than atomic blocks. In this paper, we propose a methodology to convert models from atomic blocks to abstracted Simulink blocks. This methodology would help to improve the readability of automatically generated models. Our approach is novel since the C code is mathematically modelled in terms of transfer functions in control systems to achieve abstraction of the models. We present our results on simple discrete integration Simulink block as a case study.