Case Study: Vestas achieves reliable, grid-compliant wind power plant control and automated multisite continuous integration with MathWorks

Vestas Develops Control Software for Wind Power Plants with Model-Based Design and Continuous Integration

Vestas, a global leader with more than 66,000 turbines and over 100 GW of installed capacity, faced challenges in developing power plant control software: hand‑coded controllers led to potential human error, electrical simulations didn’t include actual control code, and geographically dispersed teams needed version control, merges, and automated testing. To address this, Vestas turned to MathWorks and its Model‑Based Design tools, including MATLAB and Simulink, to align simulations and production code and support a continuous integration workflow.

MathWorks helped Vestas implement a CI workflow combining MATLAB, Simulink, Simulink Test, Simulink Check, Stateflow, and Embedded Coder with Git and Jenkins to automate requirement‑based testing, closed‑loop simulation, modeling compliance checks, and C++ code generation for system and PSCAD simulations. The MathWorks solution produced reliable, problem‑free generated code (Vestas reports no issues found), enabled dozens of engineers worldwide to work in parallel with automated multisite CI and faster iterations, and removed hardware lock‑in by generating portable C++ for alternative industrial control platforms.

Vestas

Per Hagen Nielsen

Control Systems Software Architect