SIMONE: architecture-sensitive near-miss clone detection for Simulink models

Abstract

Identification of similar fragments of software systems, or clones, has many applications in software engineering and maintenance, including quality control and improvement, standards compliance, test management and failure analysis and prevention. Code similarity analysis systems, or clone detectors, are a mature and widely used technology in traditional software code maintenance. As model driven engineering continues to advance, technologies such as Simulink are increasingly widely used to design and implement automotive software systems. Automotive Simulink models are particularly prone to cloning due to the copy-paste authoring paradigm of the Simulink IDE, and the inherent similarity of elements and tasks in automotive applications. Thus the ability to find Simulink model clones is equally important, but is much less thoroughly studied and used.