A Systematic Design Method For High Quality Process-Control Systems Development

Basically, the development of a software system contains specification, design, and implementation. Various specification mechanisms and design methods have been proposed to facilitate the implementation of software systems. However, high system quality cannot be easily assured because of some limitations of these current design methods as well as semantic gaps between the specification mechanisms and the design methods. In particular, manual effort is needed to transform the specification of a system into a design framework for the system. Considering these problems, in this paper, we propose a new system design method. This design method is systematic because by using it, the design framework of a system can be automatically created from the specification of the system. Also, the resulting design framework can support high quality assurance for the system. This design framework is a composition of several individual components, each of which can be completely independently developed and hardened. Further, the system properties (reliability, safety, liveness, etc.) can be mathematically inferred from the properties of the individual components. These components are referred to as IDEAL (Independently Developable End-user Assessable Logical) components and the design method is mainly targeted for continuous process-control systems. The paper develops the approach and illustrates it for a vehicle control system.