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An integrated environment for computer-aided control engineering

Hickey, John (1989) An integrated environment for computer-aided control engineering. Master of Engineering thesis, Dublin City University.

Abstract
This thesis considers the construction of a system to support the total design cycle for control systems. This encompasses modelling of the plant to be controlled, specification of the final objectives or performance, design of the required controllers and their implementation in hardware and software. The main contributions of this thesis are : its development of a model for CAD support for controller design, evaluation of the software engineering aspects of CAD development, the development of an architecture to support a control system design through its full design cycle and the implementation of this architecture in a prototype package. The research undertakes a review of general design theory to develop a model for the computeraided controller design process. Current state-of-the-art packages are evaluated against this model, highlighting their shortcomings. Current research to overcome these shortcomings is then reviewed. The software engineering aspects to the design of a CAD package are developed. The characteristics of CAD software are defined. An evaluation of Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Ada , Lisp and Prologue as suitable languages to implement a CAD package is made. Based on this, Ada was selected as the most suitable, mainly because of its encapsulation of many of the modern software engineering concepts. The architecture for a computer-aided control engineering (CACE) package is designed using an object-oriented design method. This architecture defines the requirements for a complete CACE package including control-oriented data structures and schematic capture of plant models. The details of a prototype package using Ada are given to provide detailed knowledge in the problems of implementing this architecture. Examples using this prototype package are given to demonstrate the potential of a complete implementation of the architecture.
Metadata
Item Type:Thesis (Master of Engineering)
Date of Award:1989
Refereed:No
Supervisor(s):Ringwood, John
Uncontrolled Keywords:Automatic control; Control systems
Subjects:Engineering > Electronic engineering
Computer Science > Software engineering
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Electronic Engineering
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. View License
ID Code:18846
Deposited On:20 Aug 2013 11:08 by Celine Campbell . Last Modified 20 Aug 2013 11:08
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