A complete MATLAB based application with GUI to learn GRAFCET

Abstract

This paper deals with an application developed with MATLAB at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France, for any user to be able to learn GRAFCET with numerical experiments without any automation hardware or real system. It has been designed during the COVID’19 lockdown to be easy to use for students with weak experience with computer programming (assuming few hours already spent on MATLAB) and assuming to have followed the basic course on logic systems and GRAFCET for a few hours. The user defined parts of the application is concerned with few MATLAB script files (with existing examples) to define his/her own input/output variables and his/her own GRAFCET. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows to play with two examples: A simple toy example with 5 input/output variables where the user can learn how to translate his/her ”paper” GRAFCET solution into this application and how to use the GUI to run simulations for final GRAFCET evaluations. The second available system is a 4 floor lift based on 30 input/output variables which is a more complex example to focus to evaluate the user. For each example a digital twin is also available (its development is not a part of the user work) to update the state of underlying continuous variables and logic measures needed for the evolution inside the GRAFCET based on the state of the system actions updated by the GRAFCET. Other digital twin of systems and/or user defined GRAFCET may be added in the application.