Manage Variants with Variant Manager for Simulink
Note
This functionality requires Variant Manager for Simulink®.
Variant Manager for Simulink is a support package that allows centralized management of variant elements across the model hierarchy. This support package helps you create or generate variant configurations, allowing you to represent multiple variant designs as combinations of variant choices. You can then activate, save, reduce, and analyze these configurations.
Variant Manager for Simulink is available with these main capabilities:
Variant Manager — Visualize the model hierarchy, manage the usage of variant elements across the hierarchy, and create and manage variant configurations.
Variant Reducer — Generate a reduced model that contains only selected variant configurations.
Variant Analyzer — Compare and contrast variant configurations to identify errors or inconsistencies.
For a comprehensive list of capabilities provided by the Variant Manager for Simulink support package, see Components — Manage Structural Variations in a Model.
Create and Activate Variant Configurations
A model hierarchy may contain several variant blocks, each with many variant choices. The combinations of these variant choices correspond to specific configurations of the system. Switching between these configurations and validating them manually can be complicated and can introduce errors. You can use the Variant Manager for Simulink support package to create and save variant configurations for a model and run the model under any of the configurations. You can also validate the configurations against a set of system-wide constraints that define and prevent invalid modes of operation. For more information, see Create and Activate Variant Configurations.
Analyze Variant Configurations
You can use Variant Analyzer to analyze the active status of all blocks in a model hierarchy across the selected configurations or variable groups. The variant analysis report helps you to understand the common and differing model elements used between configurations, to check if all variant choices have been activated at least once, and to see whether the model is covered completely for simulation and code generation. For steps to use Variant Analyzer, see Analyze Variant Configurations in Models Containing Variant Blocks.
Reduce Variant Model
You can use Variant Reducer to generate a simplified, standalone model that contains only the specified set of variant configurations from the parent model. For example, to generate a model that maps to a specific product from a product line (single configuration reduction), or that corresponds to a product line from a product line family (multi-configuration reduction).
The reduction process removes inactive components for the specified variant
configurations. Variant Reducer reduces associated model references, subsystem references,
and libraries in the model. The tool also reduces any dependent artifacts, such as MAT or
.sldd files, and packages all the reduced artifacts in a specified
output folder. For information on using Variant Reducer, see Reduce Variant Models Using Variant Reducer.
