Analysis and description of automatic control system

Abstract

A physical system is regarded as a set of processes designed to perform functions on streams (fluxes) of various products (materials, energy, information, etc…). Fluxes and processes are not consistently assimilable to entities expressible in a programming language, even a high-level language. New notions must be introduced. They are presented pragmatically using ADA as an exemple. The notion of hypothesis makes it possible to postulate in the model, the existence of entities which are to be manipulated as a whole. The introduction of TIME and FLUX types as well as of the new notions of process, device, receiver, are proposed and considered to be indispensable for the definition of the system models. Other notions, while not indispensable, are also introduced in order to facilitate the definition of models. These proposals are supplemented by some indications on a theoretical approach to the modelling of systems. This theoretical information is given in support of the presented proposals.