Real Time Simulation in Control System Design and Testing

An integrated automatic approach to design, implementation and testing of prototype microprocessor controllers is presented. Using software tools for automatic code generation and multiprocessor hardware resources as platform for real time simulation of dynamic system, control system designer can perform synthesis, implementation, functional testing and evaluations of prototype industrial controllers in the early phase of their development cycle. Simulator based testing enables debugging of all software and hardware faults and obtaining reliable and error free solution without risk of damages which are typical for real plant experimentation. A few illustrative examples concerning different approaches to the controller design their simulator based testing show that this technique is very attractive as general approach for a conrol system validation, evaluation and verifications.