PONE-D-25-39470A blended modeling framework for real-time design and verification of safety-critical embedded systemsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Mehboob Awan,

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Reviewer Comments

The manuscript presents an ambitious and relevant contribution by proposing a blended modelling framework for real-time design and verification of safety-critical embedded systems. The integration of C, System Verilog, Timed Automata, and DSML through bidirectional transformations is timely and impactful, particularly for industrial contexts such as ventilator and cruise control systems. However, while the framework shows promise, several aspects of the manuscript would benefit from deeper clarification, stronger validation, and tighter presentation. The following comments are intended to help the authors strengthen the technical rigor and readability of the paper before resubmission.

1. The novelty of the work is promising, but the distinction from existing blended modeling frameworks such as HOT-based synchronization, EMF-based solutions, and AUTOSAR workflows is not emphasized strongly enough. A comparative table with technical differentiators would clarify the contribution.

2. The architecture description is detailed but too descriptive; a layered workflow diagram showing data exchange across C, SystemVerilog, Timed Automata, and DSML would make the framework clearer. Complexity analysis of the transformation engine (time and space cost) should also be added.

3. The rationale for language subset selection is qualitative. Empirical justification such as coverage statistics of industrial code or representative benchmarks is required. Excluding concurrency constructs like threads, tasks, and interrupts limits applicability for safety-critical systems; this requires justification and discussion of future extension.

4. Transformation rules need deeper discussion of semantic equivalence issues, e.g., mapping System Verilog timing constructs to Timed Automata clocks. Examples of constructs where exact mapping was not possible, and the strategies used to approximate them, should be presented. Quantitative data on information loss during reverse transformations would strengthen the claims.

5. Case studies are appropriate, but evaluation metrics are too narrow. In addition to latency, memory, and transformation accuracy, please include productivity gains (developer time saved), defects detected or prevented due to synchronization, and scalability results (lines of code or model size handled). Comparisons with baseline workflows or existing frameworks would highlight practical improvements.

6. Tool support and reproducibility need more clarity. Specify whether the tool supports round-trip editing in all notations, what dependencies (ANTLR version, UPPAAL integration) are required, and provide screenshots or GUI demonstration figures.

7. The manuscript is overly long. Detailed grammar rules and AST breakdowns could be moved to supplementary material, while keeping only key illustrative examples in the main text. Figures should have clearer captions explaining their relevance to the framework.

8. Limitations are under-stated. Explicitly discuss current lack of concurrency modeling, scalability to larger industrial systems, and potential challenges in heterogeneous hardware–software co-design. A short future work section would better position the research.

Overall, the paper has strong potential, but revisions are needed to clarify novelty, strengthen validation, and sharpen the technical depth of transformation and semantic fidelity claims.

Reviewer #2: An in-depth analysis of the manuscript reveals a high-quality research work, characterized by clarity of presentation, methodological rigor, technical soundness, and a strong alignment between the data presented and the conclusions reached.

The manuscript is presented clearly and intelligibly, written in standard technical English, consistent with scientific publications in the field of software engineering and embedded systems. The structure follows the conventional academic format, with logical sections that guide the reader from the contextualization of the problem to the presentation of the results and conclusions, facilitating understanding of the work.

One of the strongest points of the work is the authors' commitment to transparency and reproducibility. They have made the complete implementation of the proposed framework fully available to promote future research. The source code, including grammars, transformation rules, "visitor" classes, and the graphical interface, is publicly accessible in a GitHub repository. Additionally, the authors have provided a pre-compiled executable for easy use and verification of the results without the need for compilation. The article does not perform a formal statistical analysis (with hypothesis testing, for example), which is common in other scientific fields. Instead, the authors conduct a rigorous empirical performance evaluation, which is the appropriate methodology for validating the effectiveness of a software framework like this. The evaluation was based on multiple well-defined parameters, such as transformation latency, round-trip transformation accuracy, edge case handling, memory usage, and scalability. The analysis presented is systematic and suitable for measuring the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed solution in the context of embedded systems.

The manuscript is technically sound, based on well-established principles. The solution architecture employs robust, industry-standard tools and techniques, such as:

The use of a central abstract syntax (DSML meta-model) to ensure semantic consistency across different languages.

The use of the ANTLR tool for language parsing, which ensures a robust and reliable code interpretation process. The use of appropriate design patterns, such as the Visitor Pattern, to apply transformation rules in a modular and extensible manner.

The robustness of the work is reinforced by the transparent discussion of the technical challenges inherent to the approach, such as the inevitable loss of information in bidirectional transformations, which is analyzed in detail.

More importantly, the data presented convincingly corroborate the paper's conclusions.

The claims of efficiency and practicality are supported by low latency times (mostly below 130 ms for 100 lines of code) and modest memory usage.

The robustness and adaptability of the framework are demonstrated by successful validation on two industrial case studies from distinct domains—a medical ventilator system and an automotive cruise control system.

The main conclusion that the framework maintains semantic fidelity with minor losses is directly supported by the accuracy data, which shows hit rates above 90% for most transformation paths, while the analysis identifies and explains the exact sources of these minor losses. In conclusion, the combined analysis indicates that the manuscript is an exemplary piece of research. It is well-written, technically sound, transparent about its limitations, and, crucially, its conclusions are strongly supported by the empirical data presented. Despite the framework's robustness, future improvements could focus on mitigating the small information losses that occur during round-trip transformations and expanding the currently supported language subsets to encompass more complex and rare code constructs. Validating the approach in larger-scale and more complex industrial projects would serve to more rigorously test its scalability and robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, improvements in the translation of rich temporal semantics (such as those of Timed Automata) would significantly increase its applicability and impact in industry.

Reviewer #3: This research work theme translates between multiple languages useful in embedded design. The paper is well-written and contributions are explained in a logical manner. The following comments may improve the quality of work.

. The artwork needs a revision for visibility. A few of the included pictures are barely readable.

. Inclue a table summarizing related research outlined in section 2.

. Consider defining: Design, verificiation, validation, modeling, etc.

. Abbreviations first appeared in text should be in full term.

. It is not clear from the text whether the author implemented the code translation for the full application code or just a part of it.

. Discussion section is very brief.

. Traces of using GenAI needs to be removed from the paper, "This rule-based format allows clear mapping between grammar components and transformation logic in C-to-other notation conversions. Let me know if you need a matching SystemVerilog target grammar or transformation rules next."

. Another major change which needs to be addressed is to revise the design. It mostly consists of documents and the code is not a primary part of it. Once, the design is finalized; appropriate language (or combination) may be used for application coding. The coding is subjected to verification (testing).

The above comments may improve the quality of research work.

Reviewer #4: This work proposes a blended modeling framework that provides bidirectional automatic conversion between different representations (C, SystemVerilog, Timed Automata, DSML) for the design and verification processes of embedded systems. Its strength lies in its real-time synchronization between the different representations and its demonstration on two industrial examples: a ventilator and cruise control. Furthermore, performance analyses demonstrate that the conversions operate with low latency and reasonable memory consumption.

However, some limitations are noted in the article:

First of all, the study appears to be quite long, which makes it difficult to read. It also gives the impression of being a book chapter rather than an article. Therefore, the authors should address this issue. Perhaps some sections could be included in the Appendix section.

The scope of the case studies appears to be limited and supplementation with larger/complex industrial systems could have strengthened the generalizability of the method.

Furthermore, no comparative evaluation of the framework with existing industry standards (e.g., AUTOSAR, Simulink) has been conducted, making it difficult to clarify the practical advantages of the proposed approach.

Reference 33 cannot be used in an academic study.

The discussion section should also compare the study with the literature and highlight its strengths and weaknesses. This will help transition from this point to the future vision more accurately. It would be even better if a summary table and commentary could be provided here.

The values given in tables 9, 10 and 11 in Section 6 need to be explained along with their reasons.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes: serkan dereli

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A blended modeling framework for real-time design and verification of safety-critical embedded systems

PONE-D-25-39470R1

Dear Dr. Mehboob Awan,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Asadullah Shaikh, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have thoroughly addressed all the queries and concerns raised during the review process. With the necessary revisions made, the manuscript is now in its final form and can be accepted for publication.

Reviewer #4: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #4: No

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