Documenting Simulink Designs of Embedded Systems

The importance of appropriate software design documentation has been well-established. Yet in industrial practice design documentation of large software systems is often out of date or entirely lacking in large part due to the effort required to produce and maintain useful design documents. While model-based design (mbd) partially addresses this problem, large complex models still require additional design documentation to enable development and maintenance. This paper introduces tool support for documenting the Software Design Description (sdd) of embedded systems developed using mbd with Simulink. In particular, the paper proposes a template for a sdd of a Simulink model. Then, the tool support we have developed for semi-automatic generation of sdds from the template is introduced. The tool support integrates MathWorks’ Simulink Report Generator and our previously developed Signature Tool that identifies the interfaces of Simulink subsystems.