Reactive Systems, Inc. was founded in 1999 by W. Rance Cleaveland II, Steven T. Sims, and Scott A. Smolka. The Company has offices in Cary, North Carolina and Nagoya, Japan.
Reactive Systems' technology base is derived from $10 million of federally funded research undertaken by the founders into tools and techniques for the mathematical specification and validation of reactive systems. A reactive system is intended to maintain an ongoing interaction with its environment in order to provide appropriate responses to stimuli the environment generates. Embedded software constitutes an important subclass of reactive systems. The federal agencies providing this funding include the National Science Foundation; the Army Research Office; the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; the Office of Naval Research; and DARPA.
In January 2000 the company was awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Phase I grant funded a study involving the firm and the Ford Motor Company into the feasibility of applying Reactive Systems' analysis technology to the development of automotive embedded software. Based on the success of the project, the NSF awarded Reactive Systems an additional $500,000 in Phase II funding to develop and deploy the Company's Reactis embedded-software design automation tool suite.
In June 2002, Reactive Systems launched Reactis for Simulink and Stateflow. The tool suite consists of three main components: Reactis Tester, Reactis Simulator, and Reactis Validator. Tester generates comprehensive test suites from Simulink®/Stateflow® models. Simulator enables users to execute and fine-tune Tester-generated tests. Validator performs automated searches for violations of user-specified requirements. Shortly after the launch, the Company logged its first sales of the product. Reactive Systems' customer base has continued to grow steadily and now includes companies from around the world from the automotive, aerospace, and medical industries.
In early 2007, Reactive Systems opened its first foreign branch in Nagoya, Japan. In the fall of that year, the company released its second product Reactis for C Plugin. The package integrates seamlessly with Reactis to offer white-box analysis of S-Functions and custom C code called from Stateflow.
In 2010, Reactive Systems was awarded a patent for its guided-simulation test generation technique used by Reactis Tester.
In March 2011, Reactive Systems launched its third product Reactis for C. The new version of Reactis brings many of the capabilities of Reactis for Simulink to engineers using a C code process to develop embedded software. The tool is especially helpful in detecting the many types of runtime errors that are common in C programs.
In 2012, the first version of Reactis Model Inspector was released, offering a lightweight viewer for Simulink models and testing artifacts created with Reactis.
In 2015 the Reactis for EML Plugin was launched to offer white-box testing of any Embedded MATLAB® incorporated into a model (e.g. in MATLAB Function blocks).