MATLAB/Simulink for Automotive Systems Design

Automotive systems are becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to design successfully as the market demands increasing complexity. Body electronics are particularly affected by this trend, a good example being power windows design. This seemingly mundane area involves meeting market and legislative requirements, which means creating a control system that combines the input from several sensors and follows complex behavioral rules (Prabhu and Mosterman, 2004). Traditional design methodologies involve writing a text specification and implementing algorithms in C. However, algorithms cannot be verified without hardware. This approach leaves the engineer in the unenviable position of waiting for the last piece of hardware to arrive to enable them to test their system. To avoid these problems, engineers need to decouple algorithm development and verification from the availability of hardware. To address this need, OEMs and suppliers around the world are switching to model-based design