Knowledge-Based Interfaces to a Computer-aided Control System Design Package

Abstract

Design of automatic control systems is a computationally intensive process. This motivates the development of accessible, easily usable and shareable interactive computing environment incorporating specialized knowledge of the theory and codified practice of automatic control. Expert and knowledge based systems play key role in creation of such environment. The expert system techniques can be used for the design of control systems. SFPACK is a special purpose interactive computer language for control system design. One feature of this package is that it incorporates an expert system development facility called DECESS. This expert system development facility can be used to design controllers for linear multivariable control systems. This paper describes an object-oriented knowledge interface to SFPACK. SFPACK has been used as a teachware for presenting techniques in control system design. The package runs on a SUN workstation or VAX machines and has been used successfully in a course on control engineering at the graduate level.