A Case Study for Tooling the Design Trajectory of Embedded Control Systems

Abstract

Abstract – We strive to allow a mechatronic system de-signer the power of designing mechatronic systems in manners of concurrent engineering in short time at a frac-tion of the present day costs. In our context, this means a methodology and tool support to stepwise refinement in analysis and design of the plant to be controlled, computing and I/O hardware and computer code which provide all operational functionalities. Nowadays, it is impossible to separate control engineer-ing from software engineering. There is no way of imple-menting control strategies other than transform them in computer code for chosen processing target. Usually, there are not many “general-purpose programmers ” available in control engineering research teams in companies and uni-versities. In these cases, used software development tech-niques suffer from insufficiencies in knowledge in disci-plines of software modeling, familiarity with concurrency in software, ways of allowing for reusability, software test-ing and so on. The gap between control laws design and implementing them on the targeted platform(s) is recog-nized as critical and not methodologically covered by exist-ing approaches and tools. This paper, reporting on the progress of project TES.5224, presents evolution of a system based on a 2DOF robot as a prototype of a design trajectory. Keywords – embedded control systems (ECS) design, system-level modeling, stepwise refinement, integrated tools, CSP/CT, simulate-ability, design portability, soft-ware quality, software specification, concurrency, robotics I.