Case Study: BAE Systems achieves a low-CPU, production-grade Type 45 on-board trainer and halves development effort with MathWorks

BAE Systems Surface Ships Develops On-Board Trainer Plant Simulation for Royal Navy

BAE Systems Surface Ships built an On-Board Trainer (OBT) to train Type 45 destroyer crews but faced the challenge of developing a realistic, real-time plant simulation before the ship systems and Platform Management System (PMS) were fully designed. The team needed to model roughly 4,000 I/O and many internal signals, simulate cascading physical faults, trace changing requirements, and meet a customer CPU target of under 20% on a 2 GHz processor. To do this they used MathWorks tools, including MATLAB, Simulink, Embedded Coder, and Simulink Report Generator.

Using MathWorks’ Model-Based Design workflow, BAE Systems created Simulink models and test harnesses for the ship’s propulsion, generation, distribution, steering, bilge, and damage-control systems, generated documentation with Simulink Report Generator, and produced production C code with Embedded Coder. The delivered solution produced 90,000 lines of generated code that used just 2% CPU (far below the 20% requirement), cut development effort roughly in half using a three‑engineer team, provided early specification feedback to the Type 45 project, and delivered phase one (about 80 faults) with subsequent phases underway.

BAE Systems

Peter Worthington

Principal Engineer