Clone detection in automotive model-based development

Model-based development is becoming an increasingly com-mon development methodology. In important domains like embedded systems already major parts of the code are gener-ated from models specified with domain-specific modelling languages. Hence, such models are nowadays an integral part of the software development and maintenance process and therefore have a major economic and strategic value for the software-developing organisations. Nevertheless almost no work has been done on a quality defect that is known to seriously hamper maintenance productivity in classic code-based development: Cloning. This paper presents an ap-proach for the automatic detection of clones in large mod-els as they are used in model-based development of con-trol systems. The approach is based on graph theory and hence can be applied to most graphical data-flow languages. An industrial case study demonstrates the applicability of our approach for the detection of clones in Matlab/Simulink models that are widely used in model-based development of embedded systems in the automotive domain