Continuous Integration: CI/CD Automation for Model-Based Design

Simplify adoption and optimize CI/CD workflows for Simulink

The Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Automation for Simulink Check™ support package helps you generate your continuous integration pipeline, prequalify on your desktop to avoid build failures, and execute incremental builds on your CI system.

The support package provides:

Customizable process modeling system to define your build and verification process
Build system to automatically generate a pipeline of tasks and perform optimized builds in your CI system
Process Advisor app to deploy and automate your prequalification process to reduce build failures
Integration with CI systems such as Jenkins or Gitlab

CI/CD 2.0: From Scripted Jenkins Pipelines to Process Advisor

Define Build and Verification Processes

With the process modeling system, you can define the steps of your build and verification process for Model-Based Design. The process model drives automation and defines a consistent process that can be deployed to engineers in your team and the CI system. A customizable process model for Model-Based Design is provided with the support package, which includes common tasks such as checking modeling standards, running tests, and generating code to help you get started. Custom tasks can be written and integrated into the process model to support third-party tools.

MATLAB Project and your process model are input to the build system for analysis, which then generates a list of pipeline tasks.

Generate Pipelines and Perform Incremental Builds

The build system analyzes your project and automatically generates a pipeline of tasks based on your process model, which you can execute on your CI system and desktop. The build system provides a consistent API that is accessible in a CI environment or on the desktop. The build system can detect changes to artifacts and perform incremental builds that only run tasks with outdated results to reduce your build time.

Reference Book

The Process Advisor app shows a list of tasks with pass results for all tasks except one test that failed. A cursor hovers over a link to the test result file for the failing test.

Prequalify Changes Locally

The Process Advisor app provides a graphical front-end integrated into Simulink to prequalify changes locally to avoid build and test failures in your CI/CD system. You can also use the app to deploy your Model-Based Design process to the team, helping them identify, automate, and complete the development and verification activities in compliance with industry standards such as ISO 26262 and DO-178. The app uses the build system in the package to detect changes to artifacts and automatically determines the impact on your existing tasks to minimize build time.

Graphic shows the development lifecycle from three MATLAB and Simulink developers interacting with a source control repository. An arrow from the repository shows the flow to trigger the build on a CI platform with results flowing back to the developers.

Integrate with Your CI/CD Systems

You can use the support package to integrate your Model-Based Design process into common CI/CD systems. An example YAML file is included with the support package. The file demonstrates how you can configure and integrate the build system to generate and execute your Model-Based Design pipeline in a CI/CD system like GitLab^® or Jenkins^®. The Model-Based Design build generates a report that summarizes the results, and it produces a detailed log file to troubleshoot any issues.