High quality automatic code generation for control applications

Automatic code generation has become a popular technique for generating software for control applications. The popularity of the technique is justified by the convenience of programming in a domain-specific specification language, and the elimination of communication errors between the control-law designer and the software engineer. Unfortunately, in the rapid rush toward the marketing and adoption of this technique, efforts directed toward generating high-quality code have often come half-heartedly as an afterthought. The author proposes some guidelines to be used to judge the quality of code generated for control applications. Many of these guidelines are directed toward the efficient use of time and space resources. Others impact the maintainability of the code, as well as the viewpoint of validation and verification. The author also introduces ControlH, and its corresponding code generator. ControlH is a language developed at Honeywell for specification of control applications. Its code generator translates applications specified in ControlH into applications implemented in Ada. These applications meet the author's guidelines for quality code generation