A Development of an Intelligent Man-machine Interface for Computer-aided Design, Simulation and Implementation of Control Systems

Abstract

Abstract The philosophy. aims and recent results obtained in an investigation of improvements in the human-computer interface for computer-aided analysis. simulation and implementation of control systems are described in this paper. It is shown that descriptions of control systems in the form of block diagrams and signal flow graphs with standard mathematical text improves the interface by making it more natural. familiar and friendly for the user. The support of this natural interface. through a menu-driven. high-resolution colour graphics workstation environment with both local and networked computing resources is described. Design criteria are develLlped for the data structures. data transformations and consistency-checking algorithms that are necessary to support the user and allow the system to be used in a flexible fashion. Rule-driven symbolic manipulation for system transformation. with computer algebra systems for mathematical processing at all stages of the design process, are shown to be powerful new concepts for application in this stage of computer-aided control system design and simulation.