Visual programming in ANDECS for controlled systems design experimenting

Computer-aided design of `well-balanced´ dynamic systems is an iterative search process which requires multi-models/multi-criteria experimenting by means of appropriate computational chains and loops. Visual programming is the way to set up or to modify such an experimentation environment from reusable computational modules, and to monitor its functioning. As realized in the control-engineering software environment ANDECS (Analysis and Design of Controlled Systems), visual programming relies on data abstraction in form of control data objects, and on tool abstraction to compose a software system from separate function modules which do not communicate among each other directly but via a suited database system only. In particular, this kind of visual programming yields a direct view on those parts of a modular computational set-up which can be automatically parallelized by the PVM (parallel virtual machine) software