The Making of Exces - A Software Engineering Perspective

Abstract This paper is concerned with the software engineering aspects of the development of eXCeS (Extended X-based Control Engineering workStation) - an integrated computer-aided design environment for control engineering. The requirements of such an environment are analysed and major implementation issues including modularised infrastructure, standard ‘look and feel’ and uniform and extensible data environment are discussed. The eXCeS environment takes account of each of these issues in order to provide a user interface which meets the needs of control engineers, incorporates the latest developments in user interface technology and provides a platform for a wide spectrum of software products for computer-aided control system design.