AUTOMATED DEBUGGING AND FAULT LOCALIZATION OF MATLAB/SIMULINK MODELS

Matlab/Simulink is an advanced environment for modeling and simulating multidomain dynamic systems. It has been widely used to model advanced Cyber-Physical Systems, e.g. in the automotive or avionics industry. To ensure the reliability of Simulink models (i.e., ensuring that they are free of faults), these models are subject to extensive testing to verify the logic and behavior of software modules developed in the models. Due to the complex structure of Simulink models, finding root causes of failures (i.e., faults) is an expensive and time-consuming task. Therefore, there is a high demand for automatic fault localization techniques that can help en- gineers to locate faults in Simulink models with less human intervention. This demand leads to the proposal and development of various approaches and techniques that are able to automatically locate faults in Simulink models. Fault localization has been an active research area that focuses on developing automated tech- niques to support software debugging. Although there have been many techniques proposed to localize faults in programs, there has not been much research on fault localization for Simulink models. In this dissertation, we investigate and develop a lightweight fault localization approach to automatically and accurately locate faults in Simulink models. To enhance the usability of our approach, we also develop a stand-alone desktop application that provides engineers with a usable interface to facilitate localization of faults in their models.