Clone Detection in Model-Based Development Using Formal Methods to Enhance Performance in Software Development

Clone detection is gaining more attention due to its advantages of software maintenance. Clone detection helps in code optimization (code present in multiple locations can be updated and optimized once), bug detection (discovering bugs that are copied to multiple locations in the code), and analysis of re-used code in software systems. Importantly, model-based software development is gaining more popularity due to its reduced production time and cost. There are several approaches to detect clones in the code level, but few methods to detect clones at the model level. These methods use syntactic based analysis of models to detect clones at the model level. In this paper, we present a novel approach to detect clones at model-based levels using semantic based analysis. Our method is based on model checking which involves mathematical based analysis. Our method is tested with control flow based models and yields good results in detection of model clones.