The trouble with hairy controls

What process control calls advanced control has always been hard to understand and address operationally. For its users, like other forms of software, “It sucks!” (S. Alsop, 1996). The more recent commercial acceptance of mathematical advanced controls may in fact be more due to their clearer, more predictable, and therefore more contractible nature, than to their improved control. Professionals seriously involved in trying to re-establish traditional advanced controls in an economic environment where you have to run “to stay in the same place”, should begin to understand the lessons of software applied to control. The key notion is information modeling, which relates to our familiar math modeling, but formalizes application organization for human analysis rather than mathematical analysis. Objects are the current information modeling buzz word, but patterns, building on objects, are a newer advance; both will be important to maturing the software profession, suggesting directions for control application discipline. The paper discusses the information modeling needed to integrate and discipline our control software. Previous papers have discussed a language, reflecting these ideas and targeting a minimal 3:1 improved readability and comprehensibility, demonstrable and translating to a 3:1 reduction in total cost of the application engineering. The paper briefly illustrates the discussion with a few of the language features