A Concurrent General Purpose Operator Interface

Compact interactive control consoles are rephcing traditional control rooms as operator interfaces for physical processes. In the irust major application of concurrent programming outside the area of operating systems, this paper presents a design for a general purpose operator interface which uses a color graphics terminal with a touch-sensitive screen as the control console. Operators interact with a process through a collection of application-dependent displays generated interactively by users familiar with the physical process. The use of concurrent programming results in a straightforward and reliable design which may easily be extended to support multiple devices of varying types in the control console. An implementation of the Operator Interface in Concurrent Pascal currently in progress is also discussed.