Seth on Simulink

March 13th, 2009

Continuing the semi-annual tradition, I am excited to announce the latest release of MATLAB and Simulink, R2009a.  Check out the Simulink release notes to get the full details of the release.  Here are a couple highlights of my personal favorite new features.

Save the full simulation state

This is an often-requested feature that I have personally been looking forward to for many years.  When you think of states in a model, often we think of the continuous and discrete states of the system.  Many blocks, like the Transport Delay and Stateflow blocks, store their state information in work vectors that are not part of the continuous or discrete states of the model.   With the R2009a release of Simulink, you can store the complete SimState at the end of the simulation.

You can use the SimState to initialize the model and restart the simulation exactly at the point where it stopped.

Model Reference Parallel Build

If you use Model Reference and you have a license for the Parallel Computing Toolbox, you may be able to improve your build time on multi-core machines.  Part of initialization for reference models involves building the accelerated reference model.  Depending on the hierarchy of your reference models, you may be able to take advantage of the multiple cores on you computer during this build process.

When the hierarchy has many parallel models with no dependencies, these build in parallel on local MATLAB workers.

Smart Guides

Now, as you are laying out blocks in your model, guides show up and the blocks snap into alignment with other blocks in the model.  This is a lot of fun and makes it easy to keep your model clean as you build.

Customize the Library Browser

The Simulink Library browser can be customized with an sl_customization.m file.  The options for customizing the library browser include reordering libraries, disabling and hiding libraries, and customizing the library browsers menus.

Print the Sample Time Legend

We added a button to the Sample Time Legend to allow printing.  There is also an option in the regular print dialog for models to include the sample time legend when printing the system.

What do you think?

Have you downloaded and installed R2009a?  What do you notice about the new release?  Leave a comment here and let me know what you think.

04:00 UTC | Posted in Libraries, Model Reference, Simulink Tips, What's new? | Permalink |

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9 Responses to “New Release - Simulink R2009a”

1. S S KIRAN replied on March 17th, 2009 at 12:11 UTC :
   

   I feel matlab scripting is hectic job, remembering the syntax is impossible, when can we expect intellisense in .m files

2. Seth replied on March 17th, 2009 at 14:44 UTC :
   

   @S S KIRAN - there are already many helpful features in the MATLAB editor, like the function browser and M-Lint. I find these have made writing M-code easier for me.

   

   What specific capabilities you are looking for?

3. Mike Katz replied on March 17th, 2009 at 15:02 UTC :
   

   @S S KIRAN - You’ll get function hints (like Seth just pictured) if you have MATLAB R2008b or newer. Tab completion is also available in the Editor.

   Make sure you have these enabled in the preferences:
   File -> Preferences -> Keyboard.

4. Kai Hartnack replied on March 18th, 2009 at 13:22 UTC :
   

   are the new features platform-independent? for example, on unix systems there still is no model explorer available what has been in the windows version for many releases now.

5. Seth replied on March 19th, 2009 at 01:04 UTC :
   

   @Kai Hatnack - All of the features listed above are platform independent. I usually work with a Windows machine, so I asked on of my colleagues to try the Model Explorer on his 64-bit Linux box, and he found that it worked at least as far back as R2006a. What release and OS are you using?

6. Kai Hartnack replied on March 20th, 2009 at 08:02 UTC :
   

   @ Seth:

   Sorry, I checked the Windows version and the feature I’m looking for is called “Model Browser”. I like the Windows Simulink GUI to have the whole model structure as a tree view in my model window. Also, I can easyly manage two or three different models, because I can keep every model in a single window. Using linux version of Simulink every subsystem opens in a new window, no model browser is available.

   I already requested this feature at the Mathworks support with the answer “we are working on it”, but it’s been one year now…

7. Kai Hartnack replied on March 20th, 2009 at 08:32 UTC :
   

   …by the way I’m using 2007b…

8. Seth replied on March 24th, 2009 at 01:46 UTC :
   

   @Kai Hartnack - The current Simulink editors do have some limitations based on the platform you use. Our long term goal is to upgrade the editors so all features will work across all platforms. This is part of a major architectural upgrade that has been on-going for a few years. Thanks for letting us know that this is important to you.

9. Kai Hartnack replied on March 24th, 2009 at 15:25 UTC :
   

   Thanks for the answer and by the way in general thanks for this blog, I really like it :-)

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These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.