MATLAB and Simulink for Automotive

Developing the next generation of vehicles presents significant challenges for every automotive manufacturer. With consumers and national legislatures demanding ever-higher fuel efficiency, performance, and safety levels, the automotive industry must respond. Leading automotive “original equipment manufacturers” (OEMs) are leveraging MATLAB® and Simulink® capabilities to accelerate development processes and deliver vehicles that satisfy market demands.

Automated Driving and Advanced Driving Assistance Systems with MATLAB, Simulink, and RoadRunner

Automated driving and advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) are revolutionizing the automotive industry and transforming the way we drive. These systems rely on complex algorithms, sensors, and control systems to make driving safer, more convenient, and more efficient. MATLAB, Simulink, and RoadRunner provide a powerful and integrated solution for the development of automated driving and ADAS systems, enabling engineers to gain unique insights into real-world behavior, streamline their workflows, reduce development and testing time, and verify the functionality of embedded software.

With MATLAB, Simulink, and RoadRunner, engineers can:

• Collect, process, visualize, and label data
• Simulate a wide range of driving scenarios, including lane changes, merging, passing, and more
• Design, deploy, and integrate path planning-, vehicle control- and perception algorithms by using sensor data.

Read this whitepaper to learn about key competencies for autonomous vehicle development.

AI in Automotive Engineering

The advances in AI over the past decade have provided automotive engineers with new ways of designing cutting-edge features and product enhancements. This has led to a new level of efficiency in the automotive industry, enabling automotive OEMs to develop products that are more sophisticated, reliable, and safe. AI has been instrumental in helping engineers design autonomous driving-, advanced driver-assist-, predictive maintenance-, and advanced infotainment systems. By leveraging MATLAB capabilities for AI, engineers can access and preprocess large amounts of data, such as fleet and vehicle data, make real-time decisions, build machine learning and predictive models, and deploy models to enterprise IT systems.

With MATLAB and Simulink, engineers can:

• Dramatically reduce human supervision and development time
• Reduce simulation complexity by using reduced order modeling (ROM) 
• Generate synthetic data from Simulink to improve datasets
• Automate training, tuning, and visualization with AI modeling apps
• Accelerate AI training on GPUs, cloud, and data center resources without specialized programming
• Access AI models from the broader AI community
• Integrate AI into a system-wide context, simulate it before moving to hardware, and verify its effectiveness
• Simulate rare system failures to avoid them in the real world
• Drive new standards for AI.

Virtual Vehicle Development with Simulink

A virtual vehicle enables automotive engineers to shift prototyping, integration, and validation to simulation. By utilizing MATLAB and Simulink capabilities, engineers can quickly gain insights into real-world behavior, perform virtual testing in various scenarios, and verify the functionality of embedded software in a safe and controlled environment, making the entire development process more cost-effective. Furthermore, Simulink built-in examples of virtual vehicles provide engineers easy-to-use, streamlined design and validation models, which lead to faster time-to-market for new products. Engineers can gain insights into real-world behavior quickly, perform early testing, and verify the functionality of embedded software. 

With MATLAB and Simulink, engineers can: 

• Use proven tools and modules for modeling physics and software 
• Reduce time-to-simulation with Powertrain Blockset and Vehicle Dynamics Toolbox reference applications
• Enjoy a common platform for model reuse 
• Easily access solutions for large-scale modeling and simulation. 

MATLAB and Simulink for Electric Vehicle Development

Advancements in electric vehicle technology are having a profound impact on the automotive industry. Competition within it is expected to intensify as new players enter, and existing companies expand their offerings. To keep up with the evolving market, automotive companies are investing in the research and development of new technologies that improve electric cars’ performance and sustainability. By using MATLAB and Simulink in the development process, automotive engineers have access to all the tools they need to design, test, and validate their systems. In addition, MATLAB and Simulink provide a unified platform for the development and deployment of algorithms, enabling engineers to collaborate in a unified environment. As a result, the development process is simplified and becomes more efficient, which is especially crucial in a fast-paced and rapidly evolving market such as the electric mobility industry.

Learn more about electric vehicle architecture modeling and simulation from our on-demand webinar.

AUTOSAR

AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) is an open and standardized software architecture being used in the global development collaboration of manufacturers, suppliers, service providers, and tool developers within the automotive industry. 

Using Simulink and AUTOSAR Blockset, engineers can: 

• Model AUTOSAR Classic or Adaptive Software Components  
• Fine-tune the setup of AUTOSAR components and develop algorithmic model content 
• Create AUTOSAR architecture models 
• Use Simulink library blocks to simulate AUTOSAR component interactions at the system level 
• Generate Production C/C++ Code for AUTOSAR applications.

Learn 10 best practices for deploying AUTOSAR using Simulink.

ISO 26262

ISO 26262 is an international functional safety standard for developing automotive hardware and software. The standard categorizes functions in Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), ranging from A (least stringent) to D (most stringent). To meet the process rigor required by ISO 26262, engineers use MATLAB and Simulink with a reference Model-based Design workflow and the IEC Certification Kit. 

IEC Certification Kit provides ISO 26262 tool qualification and classification work products, together with test suites. Engineers can generate project-specific artifacts, including traceability matrices covering requirements, models, and generated code.  

TÜV SÜD has certified Embedded Coder®, Simulink model verification tools, and Polyspace® code verification tools as qualified tools according to ISO 26262 for ASIL A-D.

Conclusion

MATLAB and Simulink provide a wide range of capabilities that can assist engineers and organizations in the automotive industry in streamlining their development processes, lowering product risk, and ensuring compliance with standards such as ISO 26262. Furthermore, their ability to interact with other industrial tools and technologies makes MATLAB and Simulink an adaptable solution for many engineering challenges. 

Organizations can optimize their development processes, improve productivity, and minimize the time-to-market. As a result, these organizations get a competitive edge and are able to stay ahead of the curve in a complex and rapidly changing market.

Featured products

All products mentioned in this blog post are developed by MathWorks.

• MATLAB
• Simulink
• RoadRunner
• AUTOSAR Blockset
• Embedded Coder

Learn more

SciEngineer’ team can help you tackle your complex engineering projects.

Consulting

Through our various Consulting Services, our experts will guide your team through industry-accepted best practices to improve application and model quality, manage increasing complexity, shorten the time-to-market cycle, and reduce the cost of implementation and maintenance.

Training

Our training courses are designed to help organizations and individuals close skills gaps, keep up to date with industry-accepted best practices, and achieve the greatest value from MATLAB and Simulink.