A design tool for a distributed real-time control system
Jr. Raymond John Staron · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 1993
The recent progress in local area networks and in distributed systems has also made inroads in the area of real-time control systems. To keep pace with the hardware and system development, designers need suitable software tools to aid in the creation and optimization of distributed programs. When control system designers want to automate a machine or process, they describe its proper operation in the form of a program containing many interrelated modules and decide how they will allocate these modules to the many processors in the distributed control system. Currently they have no tool to insure that the control system can execute the program to meet the constraints imposed by either the machine or process, or the control system itself. This dissertation describes an object-oriented model of a distributed control system that we use as a basis for analyzing the problem of optimal distribution of the program modules to the many processors of a distributed control system. Built on the model is a tool that we call DesignR, also developed with object-oriented techniques. It is a software tool written to aid control system designers in putting together workable systems, i.e., control systems which meet all constraints when executing a given control program.