Comparative Study on HIL Simulators in MATLAB and LabVIEW

LabVIEW and MATLAB are two programming environments widely used by engineers and scientists during the verification (simulation) and validation (testing) phases of product development in model-based systems engineering. MATLAB is specialized in numerical computing while LabVIEW is specialized in interfacing with hardware components. This study aims to determine which medium is better suited for complex projects requiring the features of both. Such a project is the development of a Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) simulator for a wind energy conversion system (WECS). This complex electro-mechanical equipment calls for both high-precision computing and hardware interfacing. This led to an analytical and experimental comparison between the two programming environments. The criteria considered are user friendliness; availability of libraries; the possibility of creating a GUI; incorporating other code; cost; system requirements; hardware compatibility; numerical performance; system monitoring and data acquisition.