Model comprehension and effective use and reuse of complex subsystems are problems currently encountered in the automotive industry. To address these problems we present a technique for extracting, presenting and making use of signatures for Simulink subsystems. The signature of a subsystem is defined to be a generalization of its interface, including the subsystem's explicit ports, locally defined and inherited data stores, and scoped gotos/froms. We argue that the use of signatures has

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... cant benefits for model comprehension and subsystem testing, and show how the incorporation of signatures into existing Simulink models is practical and useful by discussing various usage scenarios.