Novel Approach in MATLAB Memory Management for Large Simulation Models

The Math Works MATLAB is one of the most popular scientific programming language used by research engineers and scientists. Some of the best features of MATLAB are easy programming commands, ease in viewing and analyzing results, Simulink package, algorithm library and other matrix operations. Despite its best features, MATLAB suffers significantly with limited physical memory resources of a standard personal computer (PC) when performing relatively large simulations. This paper focuses on smart array, a collection of MATLAB functions specifically designed and developed by the authors to address the memory limitation problem. Smart array guarantees the minimal usage of computer physical memory while utilising hard disk drive (HDD) as the alternative storage medium for simulation data. Furthermore, this solution is optimised to provide the best latency in reading/writing data to the HDD.