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Model-Based Design is increasingly prevalent in industrial sectors including aerospace and automotive, but lacking from college and university curricula. The need for students to be adept at the modeling of systems, their associated subsystems, and overall system controller as per the standard industry practice is the impetus for The MathWorks, Freescale, and MotoTron to partner with Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology to address the lack of students familiar with this industry standard practice. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has created the Model-Based-System Design Center with the express purpose of introducing the philosophy of Model-Based Design to the educational community. This paper describes the function of the Center and the teaching materials currently being generated.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology is one of 17 universities competing in EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge, a three year international competition where teams are challenged to design, build, and test a hybrid vehicle architecture utilizing alternative fuels to reduce the energy consumption and emissions production of a 2009 production GM vehicle [ 1 ]. Teams are presently in year one of the competition where students choose an architecture, specify components, and design the vehicle. Design includes both the mechanical integration of the parts as well as design of the supervisory control system for the hybrid system. Year two of the competition is the build phase, and year three is the optimization and refinement phase. The design phase lasts approximately 9 months and most teams will completely replace the original powertrain with a hybrid powertrain.