SL2SX translator: From simulink to SpaceEx models

The tool Matlab/Simulink is a numerical simulation environment that is widely used in industry for model-based design. Numerical simulation scales well and can be applied to systems with highly complex dynamics, but it is also inherently incomplete in the sense that critical events or behavior may be overlooked. The application of formal verification techniques to Simulink models could help to overcome this limitation. Set-based verification tools such as SpaceEx use as underlying formalism hybrid automata, which are semantically and structurally different from Simulink models. To address this issue, we are building the tool SL2SX for transforming a subset of the Simulink modeling language into a corresponding SpaceEx model. Our method is designed to preserve the syntactic aspects of a given Simulink diagram: The resulting SpaceEx model shows the same hierarchical structure and preserves the names of components and variables. Placeholders with the correct interface are provided for unsupported Simulink blocks, which can then be translated manually. We illustrate the tool SL2SX and the verification of the transformed models in SpaceEx on two examples provided by the Mathworks example library.