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The MathWorks today announced that its Simulink Verification and Validation software automatically evaluates and verifies system models for compliance with DO-178B and IEC-61508 standards and MAAB modeling guidelines, which have been extensively adopted by international aerospace, automotive, and industrial equipment markets, among others. The new model-checking features for these important safety-critical standards extend the existing support available within Simulink Verification and Validation for customer-developed modeling guidelines.

As embedded system designs grow more complex, with models expanding to tens of thousands of blocks, engineering organizations have used modeling guidelines as a best practice to improve readability, increase maintainability, and encourage reuse, while guarding against modeling errors. Typically, modeling guidelines are verified through visual inspection of models and related documentation during design reviews. However, an increasing number of organizations have reduced or eliminated such time-consuming and error-prone manual verification efforts by using Simulink Verification and Validation to capture their internal guidelines and automatically check their models.

Simulink Verification and Validation includes modeling-standards checks for DO-178B, IEC-61508, and MAAB modeling standards that are applied by the Model Advisor feature in Simulink. The Model Advisor also checks for other attributes, such as model consistency and code-generation compatibility. In addition, engineers can use the customization application programming interface (API) in Simulink Verification and Validation to develop their own modeling checks, using familiar MATLAB scripts, and register them with Model Advisor for automatic execution.

“In working with aerospace, automotive, industrial equipment, and others who build safety-critical systems, The MathWorks recognized that modeling-standards compliance is crucial to the overall development process,” said Jon Friedman, aerospace, defense, and automotive marketing manager at The MathWorks. “Many users already employ Simulink Verification and Validation to check their designs against their own modeling guidelines as a core part of their development process. Now, engineers can use the same tools to ensure that their models meet the DO-178B, IEC-61508, and MAAB standards for data types, diagnostics, code generation, and safety, without having to spend critical staff-hours on repetitive manual review work.”