Hi,
for the first issue, if the discontinuity is the problem, a simple first-order delay should do the trick. However, feeding discontinuities into the input of derivatives may also mean that you have oversimplified your model and there's some dynamic behavior that you may have neglected. This is difficult to say without actually seeing the model.
For the second issue, an alternative way would be just to close the model without saving it, then re-open it. This probably won't be faster than set_param but can be simpler. However, I'd probably still prefer finding the manual switches by find_system and then using set_param to set their values.
Good Luck, Jan
