Model Based Control Design

Many industries are under pressure to reduce their development times when they produce unique and innovative products. Working efficiently is indispensable to success in a globalized market, especially for high-tech industries such as automotives, aerospace and communications, where electronic controls are a vital part of each new product. Model-based control design is the time-saving, cost-effective approach, because control engineers work with just a single model of a function or complete system in an integrated software environment. This model-based development process results in an optimized, validated system, and there is no risk that individual components do not fit together optimally. These are just some of the reasons why dSPACE systems support model-based design strategies. To model controller strategies and the internal behavior of software components, tools such as MATLAB/Simulink/Stateflow from MathWorks^® and TargetLink from dSPACE are used. For verification in the real environment, the controller models can be integrated into dSPACE prototyping systems. TargetLink is then used to create production code straight from these models. TargetLink is also ideal for designing software components that will be used in SystemDesk^®, dSPACE’s tool for software architecture development and verification. In SystemDesk, several software components can be combined to form a software architecture that can be used as a part of an overall system model.