Case Study: Argonne National Laboratory achieves dramatic simulation speed‑up—reducing vehicle study time from two weeks to one day—with MathWorks

Argonne National Laboratory Develops Powertrain System Analysis Toolkit

Argonne National Laboratory needed to evaluate up to 800 fuel-cell, hybrid, and plug-in hybrid vehicle configurations without building costly prototypes. To create a flexible, easily extensible modeling environment and automate hundreds of complex simulations per study, Argonne used MathWorks products including Simulink, Stateflow, MATLAB, Parallel Computing Toolbox, and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server.

Using MathWorks software, Argonne developed the Powertrain System Analysis Toolkit (PSAT), building a bond‑graph Simulink vehicle framework, scalable powertrain components, Stateflow controllers, and MATLAB scripts to auto‑generate models (e.g., 780 configurations). Running PSAT on a 16‑node cluster with MathWorks’ parallel tools reduced simulation time from two weeks to one day (the distributed setup took about an hour), produced results validated within 5% of test data, and enabled scalable, automated analysis for DOE studies.

Argonne National Laboratory

Sylvain Pagerit

Researcher