CPAC—Concurrent Processor Architecture for Control

We describe a computer architecture for implementing real-time controllers. The concurrent processor architecture for control (CPAC) is optimized for computing the state transitions of a controller. While general-purpose computers are optimized for data manipulation, CPAC is optimized for state manipulation since the states of a controller and the rules governing state transitions constitute a complete high-level description of a controller implementation. The CPAC architecture characterizes a controller in terms of the sets of continuous and discrete states of the system and-logically as well as physically separates the two sets. This dichotomy results in a simpler specification of the rules for state transitions.