Aerospace and Defense

Engineering Tasks

• Systems Engineering
• Engineering Data Analysis
• Control System Development
• Signal Processing and Communications System Development
• Test and Evaluation

Systems Engineering

To help meet stringent and sometimes inflexible requirements, systems engineers depend on MATLAB® and Simulink® to design, simulate, and test aerospace vehicle systems, defense weaponry, and advanced military electronics. Systems engineers use MathWorks products to:

• Design and develop vehicle system requirements
• Integrate individual system components
• Verify and test overall system results

Developing Vehicle System Requirements
Systems engineers are ultimately responsible for developing the overall system requirements and guaranteeing operational reliability. To ensure success with these tasks, they use MATLAB and Simulink environments to design, simulate, and test product specifications throughout the entire development process. Within this single software environment, you can manage requirements, perform trade-off studies, and run Monte Carlo simulations. This enables you to integrate multiple components and multiple software products together in order to test and verify aerospace system designs and assumptions.

Integrating System Components
Once the requirements have been established, systems engineers use Model-Based Design with Simulink to integrate multiple aspects of the system into a single Simulink model. This model becomes the executable specification for incorporating multiple vehicle components including:

• Control systems
• Signal processing systems
• Mechanical systems such as landing gear and suspension systems
• Power systems such as batteries and generators
• Environmental conditions such as wind and gravity based on various MIL-STD and MIL-HDBK specifications

You can also integrate existing models or third-party solutions into MATLAB and Simulink including:

• Existing vehicle component designs built in C and Fortran
• Requirements management software such as DOORS
• Leading PLM and CAD solutions

Verifying and Testing Overall System Specifications
In addition to developing requirements and integrating individual system components, systems engineers use Simulink to verify and test the performance of the system against predefined system specifications. This includes incorporating atmospheric conditions like MIL-STD wind and gravity models into a vehicle simulation to verify the accuracy of control and mechanical system designs. It also includes building models from test results in order to firmly achieve optimal system performance.

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