Automatic Generation and Validation of Models of Legacy Software

Abstract

The modeling approach is not used to its full potential in maintenance of legacy systems. Often, models do not even exist. The main reasons being that the economic implications and practical hurdles in manually maintaining models of in-use legacy systems are considered too high by the industry. In this paper, we present a method for automated validation of models automatically generated from recordings of executing real-time embedded systems. This forms an essential constituent of a unified process for the automatic modeling of legacy software. We also present a study in which we automatically model a state-of-practice industrial robot control system, the results of which are clearly positive indicators of the viability of our approach