Case Study: Vodafone achieves rapid prototype development and 100% vehicle-location accuracy with MathWorks Model-Based Design

Vodafone Group Research and Development Accelerates Development of Prototype Onboard Road-Usage Charging System

Vodafone Group Research and Development needed to build a Europe-ready onboard road‑usage charging unit that could precisely identify vehicle location against chargeable areas and be ported to different hardware and regional service environments. To meet these requirements Vodafone used MathWorks' Model‑Based Design toolchain—Simulink, Stateflow, and Embedded Coder—to provide a single development environment for modeling, simulation, and embedded code generation.

MathWorks helped Vodafone model and simulate the complete system, generate efficient C code for an ARM7 OBU, perform hardware‑in‑the‑loop tests on a PC, and later split and port the solution to a Symbian mobile platform using Embedded Coder and custom storage classes. The MathWorks workflow produced error‑free generated code, delivered a hardware‑independent prototype, achieved final simulated vehicle‑location recognition of 100% (improving from 96.9% → 99.3% → 100%), and cut prototype development time from an estimated 18 months to 12 months, with the Phase 2 port completed in days.

Vodafone

Christian Birle

Senior Line Manager Traffic Telematics