To understand System Simulation you need to know a little bit about Computer Aided Design (CAD). You will also need to know that Matlab has a built in system of Simulation that makes it an excellent program for any student.
Computer Aided Design or CAD basically requires a user to make 3-D objects out of paper by modeling them from a schematic. The simulation is the job of the user’s mind and the designer’s hand.
A simulation is the process by which the mind and the designer’s hand can do their work together to create a physical object. A simulation will simulate the environment and the physical properties of the object that the designer is creating. So in effect, it is the virtual version of the object.
If you do a System Simulation in Matlab, you are simulating the real world. It is the best program for doing this because it allows you to run a system. Here is an example.
Suppose you have a white board with a schematic that you draw on. Now, let’s say that you were able to draw a three dimensional image that has all the information that you needed to make the drawing within the sketch.
That would be very useful and you could place it on the white board and draw on it easily with the Sketch tool. But there is a problem.
If you were to do this with Matlab, you could never know exactly what you wanted to do with the sketch. You would simply be drawing random shapes. But it is simple to run a System Simulation in Matlab that will give you the exact image that you want to use.
What you can do is have the simulation run that take all the data from the sketch and all the variables and does a calculation to return the values that you set. This is known as the Conceptual validation method. Here is an example.
Suppose you had two users that were at different points in the design and one user had a tool for changing a color and one user didn’t. You can run a Simulation in Matlab that makes the color selection according to the value of the color. Then when you select the wrong color and change it, the simulation will remove it and the tool was not used.
This is just one of the things that you can do with Matlab and System Simulation. The program can even handle problems with circular images. If you run a Simulation, you can have an image that turns into a circle.
It sounds like a lot of information, but it is really very simple to use the Simulation. If you can do a sketch, you can run a System Simulation.