The practice of industrial logic design

Many academic researchers have been working on the problem of how to improve industrial logic design. The problem that many are trying to solve is the perceived inefficiency of the current methods, which use primitive, low-level design languages, practically no logic reuse, and are very time consuming. To solve these problems researchers have focused on methods which can be verified against a known specification language, or which can be automatically generated from a specification. This work has generally been done with a minimal understanding of what the current logic design methods actually are. In this work, we present the results of an observational study of the current methods of creating control logic. We find that the current specifications are generally informal and loosely defined, and that the typical logic designer is responsible for determining the details of system behavior, anticipating potential problems, and coordinating with other designers. This is a larger range of activities than generally addressed by logic design schemes focused on verification or automatic logic generation.