MATLAB and Simulink enable railway engineering organizations to develop and maintain rail equipment and meet market requirements for energy efficiency, safety, and availability.
Railway engineers use MATLAB and Simulink to:
- Run simulations to evaluate trade-offs and optimize designs
- Develop and test algorithms for power electronics and motor control
- Generate code for prototyping or production from simulations
- Comply with EN 50128 and EN50657 for railway signal and communication systems
- Analyze data from the fleet of railway vehicles to optimize operations and maintenance
“We used MathWorks tools to design, test, modify, and implement a control system for a permanent magnet drive in one year. Given the resources available to us, it would have been impossible to deliver this on schedule without MathWorks tools.”
Model Inverters, Traction Motors, and Develop Traction Control Software
Accurate motor modeling frontloads the design of motor and traction control units (TCU) before hardware testing.
With MATLAB, Simulink, and Simscape, you can:
- Model and simulate motors, power electronics, and TCUs with Motor Control Blockset and Simscape Electrical
- Parametrize motor models to capture motor dynamics with the help of instrumented tests or import parameters from a database or finite element analysis
- Perform closed-loop simulations and automatically tune control algorithms using Field Oriented Control (FOC) Autotuner to meet speed and torque response requirements
- Perform rapid control prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop testing (HIL) by generating C, C++, or HDL code for simulation models
- Generate production-ready C and HDL code from motor control algorithms to target embedded microcontrollers, FPGAs, and SOCs
Learn More
- Field-Oriented Control of PMSMs with Simulink and Motor Control Blockset
- Modeling Rail Electrical Systems in MATLAB and Simulink (23:46)
- Powering Electrification with MATLAB, Simulink, and Simscape
- Rapid Control Prototyping for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) Control (33:03)
- Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Testing of an Electric Motor Controller (47:01)
Deploy, Integrate, and Test Control Algorithms
You can address the growing complexity of control systems and certify to safety standards with MATLAB and Simulink:
- Automatically generate optimized C and HDL code
- Trace requirements, measure quality of code/models, and generate test cases automatically
- Integrate with CI/CD pipelines, generate code, package for deployment, and automate regression testing
Signaling and Train Control System Simulation and Implementation
MATLAB and Simulink help you to develop software for railway control and protection systems that need to comply with safety standards.
With MATLAB and Simulink, you can:
- Simulate discrete, continuous, message-based, and event-based systems
- Validate requirements, prove the absence of errors, and formally verify requirements
- Generate optimized ST (Structured Text) or C/C++ code for PLC systems
- Comply with an EN 50128 and EN 50657 reference workflow to meet functional safety requirements
Maintenance Analytics in Railway
With the support of the Internet of Things (IoT), Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), railway operation organizations are adopting condition-based maintenance (CBM) to optimize operations and maintenance. MATLAB enables engineers developing CBM to merge system domain competencies with data science and IT technologies expertise.
With MATLAB, you can:
- Access streaming and archived data using built-in interfaces to cloud storage, databases, data historians, and industrial protocols
- Clean and explore data using interactive statistical and signal processing techniques
- Extract and rank time-domain, frequency-domain, and application-specific indicators
- Generate C, C++, HDL, PLC, GPU, .NET, Python, or Java-based software components for real-time processing devices or production IT systems
- Scale your MATLAB algorithms by integrating with a variety of cloud platforms—without recoding or creating custom infrastructure
Railway Network Electrification and Energy Management Systems
You can use MATLAB and Simulink for developing railway energy management systems. These products enable grid simulation and analysis of railway electrification for different operating conditions dependent on the characteristics of voltage, current, and contact electrification system. MATLAB, Simulink, and Simscape help engineers to model electrical components such as power sources, moving loads, distribution lines, switches, and transformers.
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