Patent ID: 8630829

Claim:
An apparatus for modeling a physical system, the apparatus comprising: a Computer Aided Design (CAD) environment configured to create a CAD model of the physical system, the CAD model having an arrangement of computer-displayed structural objects dimensionally representing geometric characteristics of the physical system, the CAD environment including a transducer library having a plurality of predefined transducers, and a graphical user interface configured to permit a user to select one or more of the predefined transducers from the transducer library, add the one or more selected transducers to the CAD model, and connect the one or more selected transducers to one or more of the computer-displayed structural objects of the CAD model; a simulation engine configured to run a simulation of the CAD model having the one or more selected transducers to produce one or more transducer signals; a graphical programming environment in communicating relationship with the CAD environment, the graphical programming environment configured to execute a graphical program, the graphical program configured to receive the one or more transducer signals, and to generate and send one or more control signals to the CAD environment to control the CAD model, wherein the CAD environment is further configured to display the CAD model.