Simulysis: A Method to Change Impact Analysis in Simulink Projects Based on WAVE-CIA

MATLAB and Simulink, which have more than 5 million users and are installed at more than 100,000 businesses, universities, and government organizations1, are widely used in numerous large-scale projects across various industries. These projects continually evolve in response to changes in business logic. However, managing the impact of these changes on Simulink projects presents several challenges to guarantee the quality of these projects. To address this, we propose a WAVE-CIA-based method named Simulysis for change impact analysis (CIA) in Simulink projects. The core idea behind Simulysis is to directly analyze Simulink project files and construct the project’s corresponding call graph. By comparing the call graphs from the old and new project versions, Simulysis computes the change set. Subsequently, Simulysis applies the WAVE-CIA method to this change set and the call graph to identify the impact set. Additionally, Simulysis proposes a signal tracing method helping the system engineers to follow, check, and debug signals through the system. We have implemented Simulysis as a tool with the same name and conducted experiments using several open-source Simulink projects. The experiments demonstrate that Simulysis effectively performs the CIA process and retrieves the impact set, producing optimistic results and proving the practical applicability of Simulysis for real-world projects. Further discussions about Simulysis are provided in the paper.

@article{Tran2025,
  title     = {Simulysis: A Method to Change Impact Analysis in Simulink Projects Based on WAVE-CIA},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {16},
  number    = {8},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Hoang-Viet Tran and Ta Van Thang and Cao Xuan Son and Do Trong Thu and Pham Ngoc Hung},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160883},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2025.0160883}
}