Issues on developing real-time control applications

The current trend in real-time process control systems can be characterized by complexity and safety increasing, and distributed implementations. Consequently, these grounds imply higher demands for tools and techniques that can be applied all along the system development phases. The domain of control engineering is adequately prepared with tools and techniques for analyzing specific control problems, as well as to designing sound solutions. The current outgrowing development of software engineering methods recommends to apply them in control engineering. A foremost question that is addressed by this paper is whether these methods offer the required features and can be successfully combined and embedded in the development process of real-time process control systems. This paper outlines the most important development issues of real-time control systems; consequently, a design methodology for constructing mathematical models and simulation of such systems is proposed. Finally, to illustrate the utility of the presented methodology, a case study that was implemented by the authors is presented.