Simulink 7.2

Product Description

• Introduction and Key Features
• Creating and Working with Models
• Defining and Managing Signals
• Running a Simulation
• Analyzing Results

Creating and Working with Models

With Simulink®, you can quickly create, model, and maintain a detailed block diagram of your system using a comprehensive set of predefined blocks. Simulink provides tools for hierarchical modeling, data management, and subsystem customization, making it easy to create concise, accurate representations, regardless of your system's complexity.

Selecting and Customizing Blocks

Simulink software includes an extensive library of functions commonly used in modeling a system. These include:

• Continuous and discrete dynamics blocks, such as Integration and Unit Delay
• Algorithmic blocks, such as Sum, Product, and Lookup Table
• Structural blocks, such as Mux, Switch, and Bus Selector

You can customize these built-in blocks or create new ones directly in Simulink and place them into your own libraries.

Additional blocksets (available separately) extend Simulink with specific functionality for aerospace, communications, radio frequency, signal processing, video and image processing, and other applications.

You can model physical systems in Simulink. Simscape™, SimDriveline™, SimHydraulics®, SimMechanics™, and SimPowerSystems™ (all available separately) provide expanded capabilities for modeling physical systems , such as those with mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic components.

Simulink Library Browser used to navigate through standard, add-on, or custom block libraries and to create models by dragging and dropping selected blocks. Click on image to see enlarged view.

Incorporating MATLAB® Algorithms and Hand-Written Code

When you incorporate MATLAB® code, you can call MATLAB functions for data analysis and visualization. Additionally, Simulink lets you use Embedded MATLAB™ code to design embedded algorithms that can then be deployed through code generation with the rest of your model. You can also incorporate hand-written C, Fortran, and Ada code directly into a model, enabling you to create custom blocks in your model.

A Simulink model that estimates aircraft position from radar measurements and includes an extended Kalman filter algorithm written with Embedded MATLAB™ code. Results of the simulation (below, left) are plotted in MATLAB. Click on image to see enlarged view.

Building and Editing Your Model

With Simulink, you build models by dragging and dropping blocks from the library browser onto the graphical editor and connecting them with lines that establish mathematical relationships between the blocks. You can arrange the model by using graphical editing functions, such as copy, paste, undo, align, distribute, and resize.

Options for connecting blocks in Simulink. You can connect blocks manually, by using the mouse, or automatically, by routing lines around intervening blocks and through complex topologies. Click on image to see enlarged view.

The Simulink user interface gives you complete control over what you can see and use onscreen. You can add your commands and submenus to the editor and context menus. You can also disable and hide menus, menu items, and dialog box controls.

Organizing Your Model

Simulink lets you organize your model into clear, manageable levels of hierarchy by using subsystems and model referencing. Subsystems encapsulate a group of blocks and signals in a single block. You can add a custom user interface to a subsystem that hides the subsystem's contents and makes the subsystem appear as an atomic block with its own icon and parameter dialog box.

You can also segment your model into design components to model, simulate, and verify each component independently. Components can be saved as separate models by using model referencing, or as subsystems in a library. They are compatible with configuration management systems, such as CVS and ClearCase, and with any registered source control provider application on Windows® platforms.

You can reuse the design components on multiple projects, easily maintaining audit and revision histories.

Organizing your models in this way lets you select the level of detail appropriate to the design task. For example, you can use simple relationships to model high-level specifications and add more detailed relationships as you move toward implementation.

Configurable Subsystems

Configurable subsystems let you associate design variants with subsystems within a model. This capability simplifies the creation and management of designs that share components, as one model can represent a family of designs.

Conditionally Executed Subsystems

Conditionally executed subsystems let you change system dynamics by enabling or disabling specific sections of your design via controlling logic signals. Simulink lets you create control signals that can enable or trigger the execution of the subsystem based on specific time or events.

Logic blocks let you model simple commands to control enabled or triggered subsystems. You can include more complex control logic, as well as model state machines, with Stateflow® (available separately).