Case Study: Nissan achieves faster engine-control development and testing with MathWorks (Simulink and Powertrain Blockset)

Nissan Accelerates Development and Testing of Engine Control Software

Nissan faced the challenge of accelerating development and verification of complex engine control software across roughly 1,500 software components and many engine variants, where manual parameter tuning and heavy simulations led to long cycle times and duplicated effort between model-in-the-loop (MIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing. To address this, Nissan adopted MathWorks’ Model-Based Design tools—primarily MATLAB, Simulink, Powertrain Blockset, and Simulink Coder—to build standardized, parameterized engine plant models and automated test workflows.

Using MathWorks’ Simulink and Powertrain Blockset dynamic engine reference and the Resize Engine/Recalibrate Controller features, Nissan automatically generated and validated engine variants, reused the same models for MIL and HIL (deploying generated code to dSPACE for real-time testing), and ran automated MATLAB test frameworks. The result: variant models created in hours instead of days, code development costs reduced by about two-thirds, and HIL preparation cut from one week to one day—accelerating development and improving software quality.

Nissan

Hiroshi Katoh

Deputy General Manager