A workbench for digital control systems

A toolbox for developing applications for debugging, tuning, and field-testing digital control systems is described. It is primarily intended for the programmer responsible for the coding of the control software, and it provides a diagnostic environment in which this custom software will run. The operator workbench, i.e. the facility the control specialist uses actually to set up and test a system once the custom software has been generated, is also described. It comprises a commissioning utility, which manages a menu-assisted choice of predefined control structures and algorithms, and a multitasking run-time module, which gives the user full interactive control over the evolution of the control system, and the monitoring of its behavior. Underlying the structure of the run-time module is the concept of Petri nets, which describe in a natural way the concurrent and event-related activities of the control system, the interactive user interface, and the monitoring/data-logging utilities. The highly modular structure of the environment makes it equally well suited for simulating the behavior of an entire control system or for tuning an algorithm to a real-world process.<>