User Case Study:
Maple Used for Analyses and Deployment at Renowned Automotive Parts Manufacturing Company

A global supplier of vehicle technology has chosen Maple, the technical computing software from Maplesoft, to automate their engineering analyses functions, and as a deployment solution throughout their organization. Maple, the technical computing software from Maplesoft, provides a complete environment for rapid solution development within any technical organization, from original concept to solutions deployed in the field.

A team of electrical engineering managers at this leading automotive parts company chose Maple because of its engineering notebook interface, math functionality and the ability to freely deploy interactive applications to a broader audience. One aspect of the technology that was of particular importance was Maple’s ability to translate SPICE netlists into transfer functions. This automatically removes errors from what is traditionally a manual task.

The team is responsible for developing applications for the rest of the organization as well as external customers to use. The team identified three classes of Maple users at their company - application authors, end users, and engineers.

Application authors use Maple to develop sophisticated analyses for electrical engineering. They use a wide range of Maple features to develop their applications, including non-linear fitting, symbolic transfer function manipulation, plotting, and programming. This functionality offers greater power and flexibility than the tools in their previous math package. For example, their previous math tool had the following key limitations that Maple does not have:

• It would not let them create a program with a variable number of arguments - this meant they had to create multiple versions of the same program to handle different scenarios. Maple does not have this limitation, allowing the team to simplify their code.
• It did not have built-in tools for generating Bode plots. Maple, on the other hand, offers a complete set of tools for analyzing and visualizing transfer functions.

The second class of users, considered the end users, both internal and external, utilizes the applications developed by the application authors. The applications are deployed with the Maple Player, a free solution that lets users view and interact with Maple documents to solve problems, visualize solutions, and explore concepts, even if they don’t have Maple.

Engineers, the third class of users, explore the solution space for electrical design problems with Maple. They use Maple to investigate problems using natural math notation, plots, and numeric and symbolic math functionality. These analyses are documented with text and diagrams in Maple’s smart document environment to ensure auditability. Before Maple, engineers at the company employed other tools that did not offer the same level of analysis and documentation capabilities provided by Maple.

The team feels that using Maple makes them better able to complete advanced engineering analyses, deploy solutions to the end users and engineers, and preserve corporate knowledge.

Contact Maplesoft to learn how Maple can help with your projects