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Over the last decade, the automotive industry has embraced model-based development for control systems. Many of these companies have chosen Simulink from MathWorks to design and simulate these models. However, a remaining issue is the fact that many control systems were initially written in C and are still being used. Some companies have attempted to manually convert these C systems to Simulink models but have found this method to be too costly, error-prone, and time consuming. EnSoft decided to tackle this problem by providing a semi-automated conversion using our Atlas for C tool. Atlas is a tool that maps software and creates a relation map for all parts of the program. It then offers the developer tools to query and visualize this graph. We have developed Modelify, a tool built on this framework that performs the necessary queries on a C project and creates equivalent Simulink models and subsystems.

Today virtually all leading OEMs and suppliers have adopted model-based development using Simulink as part of their processes. Although the issue of revision control and configuration management has been previously addressed, the lack of high-quality diff and merge tools has prevented the adoption of simpler, more robust practices for revision control and configuration management. In 2009, 3-way merge for Simulink models became available for the first time. This timely paper discusses how teams of differing sizes can dramatically improve how they manage their models and collaborate as a team by adopting modern methods enabled by the recent availability of 3-way merge tools for Simulink models.