The development of a graphical environment for the computer aided design of control systems

A graphical environment for computer-aided control system design has been developed based on a hierarchical mouse-and-menu command structure which provides access to both in-house and commercially available design and analysis tools and packages through file-based interfaces. Facilities are provided for the input of system descriptions in either block diagram or signal flow graph form. This paper is concerned with the problems associated with the provision of an automatic means of transformation between the two dynamic system model representations. Such problems include not only the transformation of topological data, representing for example connections between blocks or nodes, but also the automatic generation of the layout of both block diagrams and signal flow graphs in an aesthetically acceptable form