Case Study: AVL halves development time to deliver 1°C‑accurate dynamic engine conditioning controller with MathWorks

AVL Develops Dynamic Controller for Engine Conditioning System Using Embedded Code Generation for PLCs

AVL needed to deliver a dynamic engine-conditioning control system for a passenger-vehicle test bed in just six weeks to maintain engine temperature within 1 °C across –20 to +110 °C; their existing steady‑state C controller had a 5 °C dynamic error. To meet the tight schedule and enable rapid iteration, AVL used MathWorks Model‑Based Design tools—primarily MATLAB, Simulink, Stateflow, and Embedded Coder—to design, simulate, and prototype the controller.

Using MathWorks tools, AVL built a model-based controller (state machine plus PI loops), ran simulations and software‑in‑the‑loop tests, generated C code with Embedded Coder, and deployed the controller to a B&R X20 PLC for real‑time testing. The result: the project finished in six weeks (about half the time versus hand‑coding), design iterations moved from days to hours, documentation time was effectively eliminated (saving roughly a week on this project and months on larger ones), and the final system met the 1 °C temperature requirement.

AVL

Josef Mayrhofer

Lead Engineer