Simulink: Model-Based Design

Simulink provides a visual, block-based language that abstracts the underlying differential equations governing a system’s behavior. This approach, known as Model-Based Design (MBD), places a system model at the center of the development process. Instead of writing textual code, engineers and scientists can build a model by dragging and dropping blocks from extensive libraries and connecting them to represent signal flow. The environment includes a set of numerical solvers for simulating the system’s behavior over time, allowing for rapid prototyping and analysis of dynamic systems, including linear, nonlinear, continuous-time, discrete-time, and hybrid systems.

A key innovation of Simulink is its ability to bridge the gap between system design and implementation. With add-on products like Simulink Coder, the graphical model can be used to automatically generate high-quality, efficient C and C++ code for deployment on embedded processors. This dramatically reduces manual coding errors and accelerates the development cycle for complex control systems found in cars, aircraft, and industrial machinery. The model becomes a single source of truth for simulation, testing, and final implementation, enabling practices like hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation, where the generated code runs on a real-time processor that interacts with physical hardware.