A support system shell to develop and configure automation functions for electric plants

The automation of various classes of plants at ENEL-Societa´ per Azioni, the Italian Electricity Board, has lead to the development of standardized automation devices, where both hardware and software architectures have been stated. In this paper we describe EPD*, a prototypical integrated environment that provides a knowledge-based shell in order to support both the design and the configuration of the automation software. In EPD* environment, automation experts can design the applicative software for a class of plants using a declarative formalism based both on finite-state automata and high-level compositional structures. Thus, this design specializes the EPD*´s configuration support system shell in order to acquire from the plant technicians (that are neither computer-science experts nor automation experts) the description of each plant structure. EPD* automatically derives from it all the information needed to configure the applicative software for the plant considered and to generate an executable program for the standard hardware