I stumbled upon a blog post over at The Green Garage where they interviewed a couple of my colleagues, Paul Smith and Shaun Kalinowski.  They talked to them in front of the MathWorks booth at the SAE World Congress in Detroit.

The focus of the interview is about answering the question “How do you make math cool again for students these days?”  MathWorks is an EcoCAR sponsor, and Shaun is one of the mentors for an EcoCAR team.  I really like Paul’s comparison of engineering simulation to playing video games while you are doing your work.

About thirty seconds into the video Paul describes Model-Based Design as “a technique used by engineers to design the next generation of systems that go into cars, airplanes and cell phones.”  I have had many conversations with people who say they are doing Model-Based Design.  Are they all using the same technique?  How do you define and document what that technique is?

I think this line of questioning leads to an interesting observation.  Model-Based Design means different things to different people, and there is no one right way to do it. The MathWorks website has some great user stories about applying Model-Based Design techniques.  These storied include companies like Boeing, Astrium, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, Toyota, and Xerox. Each of these user stories tells of the specific benefits that group received from applying Model-Based Design.

Now I ask the following question:

What does Model-Based Design mean to you?

If you are using Model-Based Design, how are you doing it?  What is the most important benefit?

Please leave comments on this blog post, or if you want to be a guest blogger and write something a little
longer, e-mail me directly.