CADC: A Computer Aided Design Tool for Control Systems of Complex Processes

Abstract During the last years a large effort has been made at ENEL-CRA (Automatica Research Center of the Italian Electricity Board) in the development of CAD tools aiding the engineers in the construction of dynamic mathematical models and in the design and tuning of control systems. The last born CADC is integrated with the previous tools and contains a variety of analysis and synthesis algorithms helping the designer during the various phasis of the conception and of the tuning of the control systems. In this paper, the activities made possible by the overall CAD system are described, starting from the non-linear models assembling up to the CADC typical design procedure of control systems. In particular the software architecture is outlined and the available tools and algorithms are described. An application of control system design using CADC is also presented.