Book Image

Getting Started with Simulink

By : Luca Zamboni
Book Image

Getting Started with Simulink

By: Luca Zamboni

Overview of this book

Simulink is an engineer's Swiss army knife: instead of spending the day typing out complex formulas, Simulink enables you to both draw and execute them. Block after block, you can develop your ideas without struggling with obscure programming languages and you don't have to wait to debug your algorithm - just launch a simulation! Getting Started with Simulink will give you comprehensive knowledge of Simulink's capabilities. From the humble constant block to the S-function block, you will have a clear understanding of what modelling really means, without feeling that something has been left out. By the time you close the book, you'll be able to further extend your modelling skills without any help. We''ll start with a brief introduction, and immediately start placing the first blocks. Little by little, you'll build a car cruise controller model, followed by the mathematical model of a sports car in order to calibrate it. Then you'll learn how to interface your Simulink model with the external world. This book will give you an easy understanding of the tools Simulink offers you, guiding you through a complex exercise split into the three main phases of Simulink development: modelling, testing, and interfacing.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Where Simulink excels


There are two main use cases for Simulink.

The first one is in the academic research world where Simulink is used to simulate multidomain dynamic systems. Typically, Simulink is used in a continuous-time environment with variable step-size implicit solvers; the main scope of the simulation is to reproduce the behavior of a real system in order to predict the answer to the applied stimuli.

The second one is in the automotive, aerospace, avionics, and the defense industry where Simulink is used to build models for real-time, safety-critical, embedded targets with many people involved in the specification, development, and testing phases. The main scope of the simulation is to find and correct bugs in order to produce (through the appropriate code-generation software) a final C code to compile in the target processor. The simulation solver used in this environment is the fixed-size step explicit one, and the model doesn't contain any continuous states.