An Evaluation of the Performance of the ODE Solvers Implemented in Matlab for Simulating Multibody Systems

Ease of modeling and producing accurate results in an acceptable time are two key expectations from an environment used for the simulation of multibody systems. The latter is closely related to the solver used by the simulation environment and plays an essential role in evaluating the quality of the simulation process. In this study, the performances of some solvers used in MATLAB, SIMULINK, and SIMSCAPE MULTIBODY environments are investigated and preliminary results are presented. In this vein, three different models of the benchmark problem, which is a two mass-spring system, are developed in MATLAB, SIMULINK, and SIMSCAPE MULTIBODY environments,and the performances of solvers under consideration are studied in terms of accuracy and computational time. In the study, the effect of tolerance used in simulations on the integral of the absolute error and computational time is considered.