The State of the Art in CACSD a Decade after Ecstasy

Abstract

In the mid 1980s, the UK Science and Engineering Research Council funded a number of projects to develop computer-aided control system design (CACSD) environments. The flagship project was ECSTASY (Environment for Control System Theory and SYnthesis), a database-mediated framework for hosting a number of popular control systems design tools. As the ECSTASY project neared its completion, some of the most urgently requested features appeared in rival commercial packages, and the short-falls in tool provision that ECSTASY was designed to address apparently went away. Using as a benchmark the capabilities of the current generation of the popular CACSD package MATLAB, the prescience of the original ECSTASY proposal will be demonstrated. A couple of areas that the environment excelled in, the use of a common information model and common user interface, will be discussed in the context of recent work done in the University of Wales and elsewhere. Finally, two topics of particular interest to the authors, the proposed standard reference model for computer-aided control engineering and an Object-Oriented Unified Infonnation Model for CACSD will be revisited in the light of recent developments in internet computing.