Model-Based Design Is Shaping the Next Phase of eVTOL Systems Development

February 1, 2026

As electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft move closer to commercial reality, companies and engineers are turning to advanced modeling and simulation tools to address some of their most complex design challenges earlier in development.

During a recent interview with Aerospace & Defense Technology, Paul Barnard, Application Engineering Manager, MathWorks, provided insights on how the advanced air mobility (AAM) sector is tackling the complexities of eVTOL systems design, with a focus on batteries, avionics and other critical systems.

A Photorealistic visualization of Supernal’s eVTOL aircraft flying in Los Angeles using MathWorks tools including the Simulink and Unreal Engine^® interface. (Image: MathWorks)

“When we look at the different categories of activity, we see some eVTOL MathWorks users are vehicle developers, some are doing avionics or autonomy or flight controls. Some are doing infrastructure, and there’s also several companies that are using our products for air traffic management,” said Barnard.

MathWorks provides some of the most widely used mathematical computing software in the global aerospace industry, with a customer list that includes Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, among others. Aerospace and defense engineers and scientists primarily use two well-known products from the company, including their MATLAB and Simulink products.

According to the company’s product description, MATLAB is a programming environment for “algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and numeric computation.” Simulink is a block diagram environment for simulation and model-based design, and the company also produces additional products for specialized applications, including signal processing and robotics.

The image shows S-A2, the eVTOL developed by Hyundai Group’s Advanced Air Mobility company, Supernal LLC. The S-A2 is a V-tail aircraft designed to cruise 120 miles-per-hour at a 1,500-foot altitude to meet typical city operation needs of 25- to 40-mile trips. Supernal engineers used MathWorks MATLAB and Simulink tools to develop a fully-functional simulation of the SA-2 performing a 15-minute flight over Los Angeles. (Image: MathWorks)

As eVTOL aircraft move closer to commercial viability, engineers are grappling with a key challenge: how to design software systems that are flexible enough to evolve with shifting vehicle architectures yet rigorous enough to support airworthiness certification. Unlike traditional aircraft development programs that can leverage years, and even decades of test data, AAM platforms are being developed in parallel with rapidly changing hardware and mission profiles.

This makes it essential to design the system having modularity and certification requirements in mind from the start, according to Barnard. One of the factors that is driving the need for the use of modularity in flight control software — and embedded software for other eVTOL applications — is the reality that many of the top eVTOL companies are still establishing the business case for their operations.

“Modular software is really required in the space due to the fact that the vehicle configurations and capabilities may be evolving as the business models emerge. So you really want to have flexibility in your system architecture and particularly your software architecture,” Barnard said. “The whole vehicle architecture may evolve as the engineers discover the most commercially viable option. How many vertical rotors do you need, how many horizontal rotors, tilt rotor versus multirotor? Those are examples of the questions vehicle configurators are dealing with.”

Tools such as MATLAB and Simulink are also proving to be a critical aspect of reducing risk and verifying systems performance earlier in the design process.

Hyundai Group subsidiary Supernal is one example of an eVTOL company whose engineers have leveraged MathWorks tools to go beyond vehicle system design and actually consider the integration of their eVTOL aircraft into a real-world flight environment. In a blog co-authored by MathWorks and Supernal “How MathWorks is Enabling Supernal’s Advanced Air Mobility Development with Integrated Simulation Systems,” the two companies describe how they used MATLAB and Simulink to build a fully functional model-based simulator of their eVTOL flying in low altitude airspace over the city of Los Angeles.

Supernal’s goal in their collaboration with MathWorks was to create a simulation workflow that helps their engineers verify the performance of aircraft subsystems within a “photorealistic urban landscape.” In Simulink, Supernal developed a detailed plant dynamics model of their eVTOL. A 15-minute flight trajectory was also imported into MATLAB, where the MathWorks UAV Toolbox was “used to interpret the latitude and longitude data and Simulink 3D Animation enabled the Unreal Engine visualization. The interface with Unreal Engine allows to bring a custom mesh model, which in this case was the virtual model of the SA-2 eVTOL aircraft provided by Supernal.”

The flight trajectory was developed using real-world geographic coordinates, flight attitude, power consumption, battery capacity and temperature. In their blog post, the two companies show a photorealistic visualization of Supernal’s SA-2 eVTOL flying through Los Angeles, with synchronized video from the cockpit view and a battery health monitoring dashboard.

NASA’s RAVEN SWFT test aircraft undergoes a free flight test on the City Environment Range Testing for Autonomous Integrated Navigation range at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in April 2025. NASA used MathWorks tools to develop the flight controls software for the aircraft. (Image: NASA/Rob Lorkiewicz)

“This is a powerful tool for their engineers,” Barnard said, referring to Supernal’s use of MATLAB and Simulink. “It is a fully functional simulator, and what that allowed them to do was to model the entire vehicle in a functional way within their intended operational environment, including the avionics, the flight controls, and including the operator’s view of these systems. That model then allows them to do different types of simulation, either having a model in the loop or by incorporating pieces of hardware into their overall simulator.”

In August 2025, eVTOL researchers at NASA explained how they’re leveraging MathWorks tools to aid in their development of a public, non-proprietary data repository about real-world eVTOL flight performance. The agency has developed a smaller scale version of a full-sized eVTOL aircraft that it calls the “RAVEN Subscale Wind Tunnel and Flight Test (RAVEN SWFT) vehicle.” The aircraft has a wingspan of six feet, weighs 38 pounds and has 24 independently moving components, according to NASA.

“NASA’s ability to perform high-risk flight research for increasingly automated and autonomous aircraft is really important,” said Siena Whiteside, who leads the Research Aircraft for eVTOL Enabling technologies (RAVEN) project.

Researchers Ben Simmons, left, and Greg Howland, right, upload software changes in real time to the their test aircraft at NASA’s Langley Research Center, during testing in the 12-Foot Low-Speed Tunnel. (Image: NASA/David C. Bowman)

“As we investigate these types of vehicles, we need to be able push the aircraft to its limits and understand what happens when an unforeseen event occurs. When a motor stops working, for example, NASA is willing to take that risk and publish the data so that everyone can benefit from it.”

Each component, called a control effector, can move during flight to change the aircraft’s motion — making it an ideal aircraft for advanced flight controls and autonomous flight research, NASA notes in an August 2025 website post about the research.

NASA is partners with MathWorks under a Space Act Agreement with a focus on the design and testing of flight controls. The flight controls for RAVEN SWFT were developed using tools from MathWorks.

“The work has allowed NASA’s researchers to develop new methods to reduce the time for an aircraft to achieve its first flight and become a finished product,” NASA notes in the website post.

The link between how engineers at NASA and Supernal are levering MathWorks tools is to center their eVTOL development processes around model-based design with follow-on simulation and testing.

“You can communicate much more with a model than you can with a static document,” Barnard said.

The MathWorks programming environment includes automatic code generation, which gives engineers the ability to generate the embedded code that will program critical eVTOL flight control functions.

Another major goal for model-based design is to help eVTOL engineers discover errors earlier in their design and development processes.

“If you find errors early in the development process, they’re much less expensive to fix. Model-based design allows you to do more testing on the desktop and less testing in the lab, more testing in the lab, and less testing in flight test environment,” Barnard said. “With model-based design, you’re creating a digital thread between all of these functions of requirements to design, to code, and to test. That’s really accomplished because the model becomes the source of truth for the code and establishes a digital thread that becomes a very, very powerful design artifact.”

This article was written by Woodrow Bellamy III, Senior Editor, SAE Media Group (New York, NY).