Representation and scheme for motion simulation of pneumatic control circuits

Abstract In this paper, a proper representation and scheme is proposed to simulate, with animation, the logic motion of a pneumatic control circuit on a computer screen. A pneumatic circuit is represented by a shared-edge dynamic graph with a hierarchical data structure, and behaviors of various types of pneumatic components are represented by sets of rules which are stored as a knowledge base. The motion simulation is accomplished by graph searching on the representation of the designed circuit, and the searching is based on an inference engine with rule matching from the knowledge base at every step of the simulation. An interactive design system has been completed with animated simulation display. And the sequences of moves of piston rods during animation, the design objective, can be automatically extracted with a graphical illustration.