Issues in the Development of the Interactive CACSD package SFPACK

SFPACK provides the very popular, matrix-oriented MATLAB environment. With the specialized control system analysis and design functions, SFPACK provides the facilities for the use of some very recent design methods. Particular effort has been made to extend the MATLAB syntax so that a generic expert system development environment can be incorporated into the control environment. In this paper, the issues in the development of SFPACK will be described. These include the development environment for SFPACK, the stages of development, coupling of numeric and symbolic computation, knowledge representation, inference mechanism, as well as the difficulties encountered in its development. The future direction of the SFPACK design package will also be presented.