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The automotive industry today follows Model Based Development (MBD) for developing modern automotive applications. This method involves creating models for a system under design and then using tools like MATLAB/Simulink to auto-generate code for target platforms. This method is popular since maintenance of MBD based applications is simple and less time consuming as compared to maintaining hand-written application code. Thus, MBD facilitates correct designs and easy maintenance of automotive applications. However, there are legacy automotive applications that are not developed using models. It is difficult to accommodate and test any changes in such application codes since it requires extensive testing. Additionally, for application code generated from models, many a times, code is changed during testing and these changes are not reflected in the model. Hence, there is a need to convert legacy automotive application codes to models.

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.