Symbolic analysis for improving simulation coverage of Simulink/Stateflow models

Aimed at verifying safety properties and improving simulation coverage for hybrid systems models of embedded control software, we propose a technique that combines numerical simulation and symbolic methods for computing state-sets. We consider systems with linear dynamics described in the commercial modeling tool Simulink/Stateflow. Given an initial state x, and a discrete-time simulation trajectory, our method computes a set of initial states that are guaranteed to be equivalent to x, where two initial states are considered to be equivalent if the resulting simulation trajectories contain the same discrete components at each step of the simulation. We illustrate the benefits of our method on two case studies. One case study is a benchmark proposed in the literature for hybrid systems verification and another is a Simulink demo model from Mathworks