Visual Dataflow Programming Research Articles

The Assist-By-X system: Calibration and application of a modular production equipment for visual assistance

Shorter production lifecycles, new challenges due to the advancing globalization, and increasing demand for individualized products are only some of the general conditions that internationally operating manufacturing companies have to face. Therefore, adaptable production systems are required which can be changed to the current requirements of the production process. In this article, a modular visual assistance system is presented which can be integrated in different production systems and environments. For a successful integration of the assistance system a calibration is indispensable, thus a calibration method for one component of the assistance system is discussed in detail. In order to control the system, a visual data flow programming tool is used in combination with MQTT as a standard communication protocol. By doing so, the programming effort of the system is reduced and new components can easily be added to the system by creating new flows.

Parametric Modeling and Real Time Remote Experimentation of a Reconfigurable Coupled Pendulum

This paper presents parametric modeling and real time remote experimentation of a reconfigurable coupled pendulum on a data flow visual programming platform – G Programming. The motivation behind creating the experiment was to make it virtually available for e-learning in the field of vibration analysis & diagnostics. The derived math models replicated the low frequency system dynamics and were used in simulations to highlight inherent system behaviour. Finally, experiment was conducted for various system configuration settings characterized by pre-set discrete lengths of the pendulums. Sensors and actuators used for the experimentation were integrated using LabVIEW. Smartphone and Cross-Platform Communication Toolkit (SCCT) was employed to establish communication between remote user and Master computer. The experiment highlighted bimodal dynamic behaviour of the system in individual and combined modes of vibration through an Internet based remote experimentation platform.

Образовательный визуальный потоковый язык для программирования роботов

Visual domain-specific languages usually have low entry barrier. Sometimes even children can program on such languages by working with visual representations. This is widely used in educational robotics domain, where most commonly used programming environments are visual. The paper describes a novel dataflow visual programming environment for embedded robotic platforms. Obviously, complex dataflow languages are not simple for understanding. The purpose of our tool is to "bridge" between lightweight educational robotic programming tools (commonly these tools provide languages which are based on control flow model) and complex industrial tools (which provide languages based on more complex dataflow execution model). We compare programming environments mostly used by robotics community with our tool. After brief review of behavioural robotic architectures, some thoughts on expressing them in terms of our dataflow language are given. Visual language, which is described here, provides opportunity to mix dataflow and control flow models for robotics programming. We believe that it is important for educational purposes. Program on our language consists of different blocks (visual representation of data transformation processes) and "links" which presents data flow between them. Domain-specific modelling approach was used to develop our language. Also, this paper provides the examples of solving two typical robot control tasks in our language.

Impact and utility of smell-driven performance tuning for end-user programmers

This paper proposes a technique, called Smell-driven performance tuning (SDPT), which semi-automatically assists end-user programmers with fixing performance problems in visual dataflow programming languages. A within-subjects laboratory experiment showed SDPT increased end-user programmers’ success rate and decreased the time they required. Another study, based on using SDPT to analyze a corpus of example end-user programs, demonstrated that applying all available SDPT transformations achieved an execution time improvement of 42% and a memory usage improvement of 20%, comparable to improvements that expert programmers historically had manually achieved on the same programs. These results indicate that SDPT is an effective method for helping end-user programmers to fix performance problems.

Carrying on the legacy of imperative languages in the future parallel computing era

Abstract There has been a renewed interest in dataflow computing models in recent years of technology scaling. Potentiality of exploiting huge parallelism, with the expense of low power, simpler circuit, less silicon area, is the main characteristic of a dataflow model. Growing trends in housing large number of functional units in a single chip, making use of local clocks, reducing energy consumptions, avoiding global wires are the main reasons behind the resurgence of dataflow models. To program a dataflow machine, new architectures suggest imperative languages rather than functional type dataflow languages or parallel languages because this is the right way to make the new architectures popular among the general community. Although for several decades scientists have been working on how imperative languages can be used in dataflow models efficiently, there is no systematic review on those works. Existing reviews on dataflow paradigm mainly focus on the architectures. Although few papers review programming languages of dataflow architectures, their discussions are limited to only dataflow languages and visual programming languages which are fundamentally different from imperative languages. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review on those works that attempt to provide a way to use imperative languages in any type of dataflow architectures. Our survey of compilers and related architectures cover the aspects like translation mechanisms of program construct, their optimization techniques, memory ordering methods, program allocation and scheduling and special architectural features. We also present some of our observations and future research directions obtained by exploring the literature.

VisualTPL: A visual dataflow language for report data transformation

Data transformation, an important part of report generation, converts the layout of source data into a new layout suitable for presentation. Many report tools have been developed for end-users to specify data transformation. However, current report tools only support a limited set of report layouts. This paper proposes a visual dataflow programming language, called VisualTPL, to resolve this problem. Data transformation is accomplished by writing graphical dataflow programs, which manipulate tables as first-class objects with a set of extendable table operations. A report tool, called VisualTPS, has been developed to offer an easy and intuitive end-user programming environment. Reports with sophisticated layouts can be created through top-down decomposition and incremental development. An evaluation has been conducted to assess end-users' performance with VisualTPL. The results indicated that end-users could learn VisualTPL in a short time and create complicated report layouts all by themselves. And, in comparison with a commercial report tool, VisualTPL offered end-users similar performances and was preferred over the commercial tool.

An engineering fellow [National Instruments

One of original founders of data collection and automated test specialist National Instruments, his many fans call him the father of LabVIEW, visual dataflow programming software. Now, Jeff Kodosky is still helping to develop engineering software and still enthusing his fellow engineers with new ideas and concepts. The paper discusess how he was able to manage company and where he sees industrial systems going next.

Interactive design of multimodal user interfaces

In contrast to the pioneers of multimodal interaction, e.g. Richard Bolt in the late seventies, today’s researchers can benefit from various existing hardware devices and software toolkits. Although these development tools are available, using them is still a great challenge, particularly in terms of their usability and their appropriateness to the actual design and research process. We present a three-part approach to supporting interaction designers and researchers in designing, developing, and evaluating novel interaction modalities including multimodal interfaces. First, we present a software architecture that enables the unification of a great variety of very heterogeneous device drivers and special-purpose toolkits in a common interaction library named “Squidy”. Second, we introduce a visual design environment that minimizes the threshold for its usage (ease-of-use) but scales well with increasing complexity (ceiling) by combining the concepts of semantic zooming with visual dataflow programming. Third, we not only support the interactive design and rapid prototyping of multimodal interfaces but also provide advanced development and debugging techniques to improve technical and conceptual solutions. In addition, we offer a test platform for controlled comparative evaluation studies as well as standard logging and analysis techniques for informing the subsequent design iteration. Squidy therefore supports the entire development lifecycle of multimodal interaction design, in both industry and research.

An automated refactoring tool for dataflow visual programming language

Refactoring tools are extremely important to prevent errors and reduce consumed time. But these tools only support text-based languages, especially in Object Oriented languages. In order to accommodate the situation that Dataflow Visual Programming Languages (DFVPLs) are more and more popular, an automated refactoring tool for DFVPL was proposed. DFVPL was divided into two layers---visual layer and dataflow layer. Two layers mutually evolved, which ensured correctness of visual elements and dataflow semantic during refactoring. Some algorithms like middle graph generation; terminal auto-generation and terminal auto-modification were proposed to implement the changes of two layers. This tool has been proved correct and efficient by some refactoring instances. In addition, we discussed some famous DFVPL like LabVIEW to expose lacking of automated refactoring tool forced refactoring by hand to be time-consuming and error-prone.

Advances in dataflow programming languages

Many developments have taken place within dataflow programming languages in the past decade. In particular, there has been a great deal of activity and advancement in the field of dataflow visual programming languages. The motivation for this article is to review the content of these recent developments and how they came about. It is supported by an initial review of dataflow programming in the 1970s and 1980s that led to current topics of research. It then discusses how dataflow programming evolved toward a hybrid von Neumann dataflow formulation, and adopted a more coarse-grained approach. Recent trends toward dataflow visual programming languages are then discussed with reference to key graphical dataflow languages and their development environments. Finally, the article details four key open topics in dataflow programming languages.

Iteration constructs in data-flow visual programming languages

Many visual programming languages (VPLs) rely on the data-flow paradigm, probably because of its simple and intuitive functioning mechanism. However, there are cases where more powerful programming constructs are needed to deal with complex problems. For example, iteration is undoubtedly an important aspect of programming, and should allow repetitive behaviors to be specified in compact and easy ways. Most existing data-flow VPLs provide special constructs to implement iterations, therefore infringing the pure data-flow paradigm in favor of program simplicity. This paper has three main purposes: (1) To provide a survey of the mechanisms used by some representative data-flow VPLs to carry out iterations; (2) To investigate, given a pure data-flow VPL, what should be the minimum set of characteristics which, after being added to the VPL, allow iterations to be implemented; and (3) To show real data-flow iteration implementations which rely on the characteristics pertaining to such a minimum set.