Case Study: Cessna Aircraft Company isolates intermittent antiskid brake fault and accelerates hardware-in-the-loop testing with MathWorks

Cessna Enhances Antiskid Technology with Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing

Cessna Aircraft Company faced an intermittent antiskid brake control issue on its Citation jets that was difficult and costly to reproduce in flight. To isolate and correct the problem, Cessna used MathWorks tools—MATLAB, Simulink, Simulink Coder, and Simulink Real-Time—to build a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing environment that could simulate landings across varied runway and brake-wear conditions.

Using MathWorks products, two engineers built a real-time Simulink model, auto-generated C code, and executed hundreds of HIL landings on commercial hardware to replicate the fault, identify a dead band in the brake controller, and validate a fix. The effort saved months and thousands of dollars (four simulations in 15 minutes versus an hour and $5,000–$10,000 for real flights), reduced ramp-up to three months with minimal staff, produced high-rate data for analysis, and led Cessna to adopt MathWorks-based HIL testing for all new brake control systems.

Cessna Aircraft Company

Alan Johnson

Lead Engineer