A Data Management Tool for Computer Aided Control Engineering

In recent years, commercially available tools for computer aided control systems design (CACSD) have been expanded to cover a wide range of control engineering problems. Simulation languages have been incorporated into formerly pure matrix calculation packages (Simulink and Matlab, ACSL and CTRL-C). The number and variety of algorithms available in those packages is also growing rapidly to facilitate the use of very sophisticated modern control systems designs. However, this vast number of possibilities is not only to the user's advantage. The problem of selecting the proper algorithm becomes increasingly difficult. Once an algorithm is found, the user then has to choose reasonable parameters. Furthermore, a variety of possible solutions also lead to a large amount of data resulting from different experiments, algorithms and parameter settings. In command line driven packages (like Matlab) it is up to the user to keep track of his work and the relations between all the vectors and matrices accumulated in his workspace. In this paper, we present a solution to control engineering data management. Data, algorithms applied and results are stored in an object oriented framework. The user is presented with a graphical representation of his work. This display and the special data structures chosen also ease the selection of suitable algorithms.