Jiro's pick this week is Introduction to MuPAD for Plant Modeling by JMAAB.

If you are affiliated with the automotive industry, you may have heard of MathWorks Automotive Advisory Board (MAAB). JMAAB (Japan MBD Automotive Advisory Board) is the Japanese counterpart.

MuPAD is a symbolic engine and language that comes with Symbolic Math Toolbox for performing analytical computation. It also comes with an interactive notebook interface for evaluating and documenting your computations.

This introductory document on MuPAD was originally published about 2 years ago by JMAAB in Japanese. It was a part of an initiative for studying the workflow of using MuPAD for plant modeling. In fact, the overarching motivation was to promote the use of formula manipulation techniques in the field of automotive control system development.

Why use MuPAD for plant modeling? There are a variety of MathWorks tools for doing plant modeling. One of them is Simscape, which allows you to create plant models using blocks that represent physical components.

However, there are cases where you may need to formulate and derive the equations that govern the physical system based on first principles. MuPAD can greatly help in this area. This document introduces the MuPAD language and environment from the point of view of plant modeling. It also shows how to output the MuPAD results in the Simscape language. This File Exchange entry is an English translation of the original document.

While the initial target audience were people needing formula manipulation tools for plant modeling, this can be a nice introductory tutorial for anyone wanting to use MuPAD. MuPAD is a full language in and of itself, so becoming completely proficient may take some time. However, this document uses a couple of simple examples to demonstrate how one might go about deriving mathematical formulations. The examples are shown in a two-column format with additional information on the right column.

In addition, there are some useful appendices discussing concepts that are somewhat confusing to MATLAB users, such as "Concept of Assignment (:=) and Equal(=)" and "Differences and Relationship Between MuPAD and MATLAB".

Comments

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Published with MATLAB® R2015a