Military Embedded Systems Summer 2006

Mil Tech Trends
the original requirements consistent and
unambiguous, ensuring a minimal design
and allowing the determination of test
vectors needed for the given requirements
to be established before software is
implemented.
Jason R. Ghidella works for The
MathWorks as a senior technical lead
responsible for Simulink platform
product marketing. Prior to joining
The MathWorks, Jason worked as an
applications engineer at The MathWorks
distributors in Australia and the
Netherlands. Previously, Jason was a
research scientist for two years at DSTO
in Australia, working on fatigue analysis
in the airframes and engines division.
Jason earned a BE in Mechanical
Engineering from James Cook University
of North Queensland, Australia, and a
PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from
the University of Sydney.
were rewritten to remove ambiguity,
11 tests were added, and unnecessary
elements were removed. The resulting
design has a cyclomatic complexity that
is 8 percentage points less than the initial
design and attains full MC/DC coverage.
Software implementation
Performing verification and validation
tasks such as MC/DC analysis early
in the development process helps
demonstrate the correctness of the design
and that implementation in software can
be assumed. Automatic code generation
provides a software implementation
efficiently without the need to reinterpret
the design by software engineers and
eliminates potential coding errors.
Figure 5
40 / SUMMER 2006 MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
Traceability between requirements and
generated code is achieved by including
comments in code generated for each
element in the design that has associated
requirements.
A winning combination:
Model-Based Design and MC/DC
In general, the requirements for engineered
systems are ambiguous, not rigorous, and
even inconsistent. It is desirable to detect
such problems as early as possible in the
system design process. Model-Based
Design can be used to achieve this goal
by facilitating executable specifications
that allow testing to start at the model
level instead of after system realization.
MC/DC coverage analysis can help make
Pieter J. Mosterman is a senior
research scientist in modeling and
simulation at The MathWorks, with a
special interest in applying computerautomated
multiparadigm modeling to
model-based diagnosis and training
systems. Previously, Pieter worked as
a research associate at the German
Aerospace Center in Oberpfaffenhofen
through a grant awarded by the
German Science Foundation (DFG).
Pieter is editor-in-chief of Simulation:
Transactions of the Society for Modeling
and Simulation International for the
methodology section and associate
editor of IEEE Transactions on Control
Systems Technology and of Applied
Intelligence. He earned an M.Sc.
in Electrical Engineering from the
University of Twente in Enschede, the
Netherlands, and a PhD in Electrical
and Computer Engineering from
Vanderbilt University.
To learn more, contact Jason and Pieter at:
The MathWorks, Inc.
3 Apple Hill Drive
Natick, MA 01760-2098
E-mail: jason.ghidella@mathworks.com
or pieter.mosterman@mathworks.com
Website: www.mathworks.com