The demands from control engineers for more user-friendly, reliable and powerful design tools led to the necessity for a computer-aided control system design environment, which incorporates a general purpose graphical man-machine interface, a common database and a toolbox for modelling, analysis and simulation of control systems in pictorial representations as well as numerical ones. The work presented herein is mainly concerned with the development of such an environment, particularly the computer-aided design techniques used for modelling and manipulating pictorial representations of control systems. The infrastructure and major components of an environment have been studied. A general graphical man-machine interface and a set of graphical editors have been developed, allowing control engineers to interact graphically with the computer to construct pictorial representations of control systems such as block diagrams and signal flow graphs. In order to handle objects efficiently in the graphical editors, point inclusion algorithms, a classic problem in computer graphics and computational geometry, has been studied. Efficient and consistent point-in-polygon and point-in-polyhedron algorithms have been designed and developed. Artificial intelligence techniques have been applied to the problems in manipulating the pictorial representations of control systems, most of which would be found rather difficult to be solved using conventional programming techniques. The problems which have been studied include the methods for representing and manipulating diagraphs in an artificial intelligence oriented programming environment, structural controllability and observability, digraph numbering, algorithms for transformation between block diagrams and signal flow graphs, and automatic layout of block diagrams and signal flow graphs. This work is closely linked with the implementation of CES (ControlEngineering workStation) - a computer-aided control system design environment developed in the University College of Swansea.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:636241 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Chen, M. |
| Publisher | Swansea University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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