EC: MapleSim 4

Software - design, simulation, diagnostics: Maplesoft MapleSim 4 is high-performance physical modeling software that is built on a foundation of symbolic computation technology, which efficiently manages all of the complex mathematics involved in the development of engineering system models, including multi-domain systems and plant models for control applications. This is a Control Engineering 2011 Engineers' Choice (EC) Honorable Mention.

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MapleSim is a physical modeling tool unlike any other. It is built on a foundation of symbolic computation technology, which efficiently manages all of the complex mathematics involved in the development of engineering system models, including multi-domain systems and plant models for control applications. MapleSim leverages the latest advances in symbolic and numeric computing to simulate demanding multidomain systems. It's the only comprehensive modeling system built within a natively symbolic framework and, as such, it avoids some of the worst sources of error and computational inefficiencies generated by traditional, numeric-based modeling tools. Symbolic computation provides the flexibility to develop model equations quickly and the flexibility to better manage models and get to the optimal results faster. Using MapleSim's drag-and-drop physical modeling environment, engineers can quickly create a model diagram that maps directly to their physical system. The system equations are automatically generated from the system diagram and simplified using lossless symbolic techniques to produce an optimal set of equations.

With conventional physical modeling and signal flow modeling systems, which are based on a purely numerical model formulation framework, once parameter values are entered, procedures are generated internally for use by the solver routines to work only with these specific values. Because these procedures do not maintain the mathematical structure of the equations, it becomes difficult to enhance the model structure or explore the parameter options. By contrast, the unique symbolic approach of MapleSim actually exposes and provides access to the model equations in natural math notation which not only assists in discerning the correctness of the models, but also helps engineers to communicate and share model information. In addition to simplifying the model equations without reducing fidelity, the MapleSim code generation tools convert these equations to real-time source code while applying additional optimization steps that dramatically speed up real-time performance.

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