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From tradition to modernity: How does model-driven design revolutionize the way control systems are developed?
In the rapidly changing technological field, model-driven design (MBD) provides solutions for designing complex control, signal processing and communication systems with its mathematical and visual methods. This design method has been widely used in many application fields such as industrial equipment, aerospace and automobiles, showing that it has brought significant changes to the design of embedded software.
Model-driven design provides an efficient common framework that facilitates communication throughout the design process while supporting the development cycle (V-Model).
While traditional design methods often rely on complex structures and bulky codes, model-driven design enables designers to use continuous and discrete modeling blocks to define plant models with advanced functional properties. These models, aided by simulation tools, can advance the process of rapid prototyping, software testing and verification. This not only enhances the testing and verification process, but also enables the use of hardware-in-the-loop simulation to examine the dynamic effects of the system in a faster and more efficient way.
History
The history of model-driven design dates back to the 1920s, when the two engineering aspects of control theory and control systems merged to make large-scale integrated systems possible. In the early days, control systems were primarily used in industrial settings, with large process facilities beginning to use process controllers to regulate continuous variables such as temperature, pressure, and flow. A patch panel network of electrical relays was one of the first discrete control devices to automate the entire manufacturing process.
By the end of the 20th century, embedded control systems were ubiquitous, and household appliances such as washing machines and air conditioners contained complex and advanced control algorithms, making them more "intelligent."
In the 1950s and 1960s, the rise of aerospace engineering promoted the development of embedded control systems, and engineers began to build control systems including engine control units and flight simulators. The first computer-based controllers were introduced in 1969. These early programmable logic controllers (PLCs) simulated existing discrete control technology using outdated relay ladders. The control market has undergone drastic changes with the advent of PC technology, where a typical desktop computer can run an entire process unit and execute complex PID algorithms or be used as a decentralized control system (DCS).
Main steps of model-driven design
The main steps of model-driven design include:
- Plant Modeling:Plant modeling can be data-driven or based on first principles. Data-driven plant modeling uses system identification techniques to identify plant models by acquiring and processing raw data from real systems.
- Controller analysis and synthesis: Use mathematical models obtained in plant modeling to identify the dynamic characteristics of the plant model and then synthesize controllers based on these characteristics.
- Offline vs. real-time simulation: Study the time response of dynamic systems by simulating simple linear time-invariant or nonlinear models. Real-time simulation can be performed with automatically generated controller code.
- Deployment: Ideally, this step is done by generating code from the developed controller and debugging iteratively. Model-driven design tools allow these iterations to occur within a unified visual environment.
Advantages and disadvantages
Disadvantages of model-driven design include:
- This approach is often a one-size-fits-all solution that cannot be customized for a specific situation.
- The challenge of version control, the lack of high-quality tools to manage versions, especially for handling differences and merge operations, can cause management difficulties.
However, model-driven design still has some advantages that cannot be ignored:
- Provides a common design environment to promote communication and system verification between different development teams.
- Design reusability is improved, making it easier to improve upgrades and derivative systems.
Graphical modeling tools are designed to improve the efficiency of design, simplifying complex models into hierarchical structures of individual design blocks, making the design process less cumbersome.
With the emergence of modern tools such as Simulink and LabVIEW, model-driven design is becoming more and more popular in the development of control systems. Does this mean that future designs will rely on this?
