MANAGING DATA in SIMULINK

Simulink is a block diagram environment for multidomain simulation and Model-Based Design. It supports system-level design, simulation, automatic code generation, and continuous test and verification of embedded systems. Simulink provides a graphical editor, customizable block libraries, and solvers for modeling and simulating dynamic systems. It is integrated with MATLAB, enabling you to incorporate MATLAB algorithms into models and export simulation results to MATLAB for further analysis. Simulink is a graphical modeling and simulation environment for dynamic systems. You can create block diagrams, where blocks represent parts of a system. A block can represent a physical component, a small system, or a function; an input/output relationship fully characterizes the block. The term data type refers to the way in which a computer represents numbers or text in memory. A data type determines the amount of storage allocated to a number or letter, the method used to encode the number's value as a pattern of binary digits, and the operations available for manipulating the type. Most computers provide a choice of data types for representing numbers, each with specific advantages in the areas of precision, dynamic range, performance, and memory usage. To optimize performance, you can specify the data types of variables used in the MATLAB technical computing environment. Simulink builds on this capability by allowing you to specify the data types of Simulink signals and block parameters. The ability to specify the data types of a model's signals and block parameters is particularly useful in real-time control applications. For example, it allows a Simulink model to specify the optimal data types to use to represent signals and block parameters in code generated from a model by automatic code-generation tools, such as the Simulink Coder product. By choosing the most appropriate data types for your model's signals and parameters, you can dramatically increase performance and decrease the size of the code generated from the model. Simulink performs extensive checking before and during a simulation to ensure that your model is typesafe, that is, that code generated from the model will not overflow or underflow and thus produce incorrect results. Simulink models that use the default data type (double) are inherently typesafe.On the other hand, if you plan to generate code from your models and use nondefault data types, read the remainder of this section carefully, especially the section on data type rules. In that way, you can avoid introducing data type errors that prevent your model from running to completion or simulating at all. At each time step, Simulink computes new values for signals and states. By contrast, you specify parameters when you build the model and can occasionally change them while simulation is running. You can use Simulink to model a system and then simulate the dynamic behavior of that system. The basic techniques you use to create a simple model in this tutorial are the same as those you use for more complex models.