Simulating Self-Adaptive Component-Based Systems Using MATLAB/Simulink

The automotive industry uses MATLAB/Simulink models for specifying the behavior of software components and for early validation of that behavior using model-in-the-loop simulations. During a simulation run, these models may not structurally change. Thus, MATLAB/Simulink is not amenable to realizing self-adaption behavior, where the software architecture of the system evolves during runtime. In this paper, we show how to model self-adaptive software using our language Mechatronic UML and how we transform a model specified in Mechatronic UML into a MATLAB/Simulink model automatically. In particular, we generate several helper functions that emulate self-adaptive behavior in MATLAB/Simulink, relying only on standard Simulink blocks. We illustrate our approach using an example of car platoons.