Technical Articles

Design Variant Management in Model-Based Design

By Saurabh Mahapatra and Priyanka Gotika, MathWorks


Modular design platforms require the customization of a single design to meet requirements dictated by considerations such as application, cost, and operational considerations. Many of these dynamic changes have required design component variations on top of a fixed master design. Modularity has proved to be a cost-effective and efficient paradigm to meet these challenges.

A previous paper introduced variant semantics and their usage within a graphical modeling environment such as Simulink. It also introduced a scripting methodology for efficiently mapping a custom design to a permutation of variants and their subsequent abstraction for ease of understanding. However, this approach required ad hoc management of variants, increasing the risk of introducing errors into the workflow.

This paper introduces concepts that address those challenges, namely, a graphical interface, variant configuration data objects, a data dictionary, and a project-based environment for collaboration. Simulink examples are provided to illustrate these concepts.

This paper was presented at the AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conference.

Read full paper.

Published 2015

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