Systematic Development of Control Designs via Formal Refinement
The Simulink/Stateflow (SL/SF) modeling framework is widely used in industry for the development of control applications. However, such models are not amenable to formal reasoning. Controllers can also be designed using formal specification languages. Such designs can be formally verified, but the models do not explicitly represent control or data flow information. In this paper, we discuss RRM diagrams (RRMDs), a new modelling notation which incorporates the benefits of these two formalisms. RRMDs are graphical formal models and they also support incremental formal development. We have used synchronising state machines to encode RRMDs. We have also developed a prototype tool which translates RRMDs automatically to SL/SF designs.
In the overall ownership cost of enterprise system, the maintenance cost consists of a major percentage. During the lifetime of an enterprise system, process customization is the most frequent maintenance efforts. However, current processing method has limited scalability and efficiency. In this case study, we explained how a scalable and efficient customization processing method was implemented. This method used the carbon emission trading mechanism to facilitate the cost benefit analysis of customization request. It also used distributed processing principle to improve the overall processing efficiency. Feedback from a pilot implementation in a large manufacturer included.