How to Tie the Man-Machine Dialog to a Project-Data Structure in Concurrent Control Engineering

Abstract

Concurrent Control Engineering aims at optimization of active systems within multidis-ciplinary projects. This poses additional problems of engineering data management with respect to intelligible data structuring, consistent data interpretation and recoverable data recording. In order to tie the engineering data produced by any program user to a standard database structure, a common basic dialog-and data handling logic has to be adopted. To enforce this, the paradigm of a ‘dialog gen-erator’ is explored: If the program developer specifies a suitable database structure, a dialog generator yields executable code for a dialog skeleton with the appropriate dialog logic. This dialog environment can be realized both by a menue question-and-anwer and a user-command interface. In turn, if the user activates this dialog environment, the predefined data base structure evolves automatically which yields a standardized view on the individually produced engineering data.