AUDI AG decided to develop a Model Viewer for MATLAB Simulink and Stateflow models in cooperation with itemis AG. The goal was to create a lightweight solution optimized for the “read only” use cases. It should come with much lower license costs, shorter loading times for large models and a better usability for reading and analysing models.
After only four month of development the first release of the Model Viewer was provided to the first pilot users from the HIL test team. Two follow up releases came with bug fixes and the implementation of additional feature requests from the pilot users. The resulting Model Viewer fulfills all initial requirements: Loading large models is up to eight times faster (15s vs. 2min). No “waiting for a license” any more. Dependencies to referenced elements in libraries are automatically resolved. The browser has a high usability and is easy to learn and leads to an efficient navigation of large, hierarchical models.
Additional features like a graphical compare of models or signal highlighting are planned and will be developed in the continued corporation between Audi and itemis. The Model Viewer is already used by more than 200 users mainly from the HIL test team. It gets rolled out to more users with the goal to deploy it to all MATLAB users inside Audi by the end of 2016. The created Model Viewer is now publicly available as the YAKINDU Model Viewer within the YAKINDU product line of itemis.
The free to use, open source toolkit provides an integrated modeling environment for the specification and development of reactive, event-driven systems based on the concept of Harel statecharts.
