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The MathWorks today announced the University of Waterloo is the recipient of The MathWorks Crossover to Model-Based Design Award at Challenge X, the three-year student engineering competition sponsored by General Motors Corporation (GM) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  The University of Waterloo was presented with the award based on its outstanding achievement in creating, simulating, and analyzing models for vehicle design and subsystem control using Model-Based Design with The MathWorks MATLAB® and Simulink®.   In addition to winning the award, the University of Waterloo also won Year One of the collegiate competition, which challenges 17 North American student-engineering teams to reengineer a Chevrolet Equinox with the goal of improving on-road fuel economy and reducing emissions, while maintaining performance and safety.  The competition concludes this week at GM’s Milford Proving Grounds in Pontiac, Michigan. 

To provide each team with an experience that closely mirrors real-world automotive engineering processes, the first year of Challenge X emphasized vehicle simulation, powertrain testing, and engineering trade-offs that occur in the early stages of vehicle design.  The Challenge X organizers selected MathWorks software for Model-Based Design, widely used throughout the automotive industry, including MATLAB, Simulink, Stateflow®, SimDriveline, and Real-Time Workshop® Embedded Coder, as the students’ principal tools.  The MathWorks also offered its real-time target system xPCTargetBox® to each team.  The student teams will use the MathWorks software during all three years of Challenge X, gaining valuable hands-on experience that they can later leverage as future automotive engineers. 

“The MathWorks software for Model-Based Design not only cut down on the time it took for our team to prototype and simulate our vehicle system designs, but it also allowed us to see the ‘big-picture’ in terms of the various vehicle components being developed,” said Professor Roydon Fraser, faculty advisor of the Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team (WAFT).  “As the only team using a fuel cell as its primary power source, we needed to establish the viability of this as a competitive powertrain option.  Model-Based Design made it possible.”  

The student teams capped off the week’s event by each receiving a 2005 Chevrolet Equinox, which they will use to implement their design plans throughout the second and third years of the competition.   The students will reengineer the Equinox, a crossover vehicle which already provides competitive fuel economy, with three basic goals: reduce energy consumption, decrease emissions, and maintain the vehicle’s performance and utility features.

The university teams for the 2004–2007 Challenge X competition are:

“The teams have done an extraordinary job working with the MathWorks tools and mentors to design and develop vehicle systems using the same tools employed by today’s automotive engineers,” said Cleve Moler, chief scientist at The MathWorks and creator of MATLAB.  “The MathWorks Crossover to Model-Based Design Award recognizes students that have excelled in their ability to successfully implement Model-Based Design to develop an environmentally friendly vehicle.  We are honored to support these students for the remainder of the competition.”