Lessons in applying Model-Based Design for systems and controls engineering in alternative energy startup environment

Engineering startup environment is characterized by resource limited small teams, required to meet aggressive cost targets and timelines for the development of complex systems.  It is often essential to quickly scale up technology, build insight into system behavior, and adopt agile methodologies for systems and controls development, while minimizing the need for building costly hardware prototypes. Additional challenges come from the need to communicate the latest system design and architecture to the whole engineering team, perform tradespace studies to explore different system architecture concepts, inform control system design, and produce cost, power and other system budgets.

This talk focuses on the author’s experience in establishing and implementing systems and controls development process at various startups, using Mathworks Model-Based Design to address these challenges. The use of Object-Process Methodology is proposed to create the model of the development process to improve the understanding of how various Mathworks products and modeling artifacts facilitate each stage of the system development. This includes the use of Requirements Toolbox for requirements capture, System Composer for system architecture design, Simulink, Stateflow and Simscape for the dynamic system and control system modeling, Embedded Coder for automatic code generation, Simulink Test for unit testing and integrated system verification and Simulink Project for revision control and file management.