ITMO University
“Programming Technologies” Department

Developing coffee-machine control system developed using automata technology

(С) 2003 S.V. Kessel

Saint-Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics

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Annotation

SWITCH technology was proposed for developing control systems by A.A.Shalyto, which fits perfectly its goals, i.e. developing of control systems of complex technical objects operating in real time. You can find more information on SWITCH technology on http://is.ifmo.ru

The basic advantages of the technology stated above are highly formalized developing process and possibility of separation of hardware-independent part of algorithm from hardware-dependent one therefore localizing logics implementation in a small part of program code. The fact that program code is isomorphous to transition graph of automats is also very important since it makes it much easier to understand the algorithm of system functioning even without looking into program code. This technology also guarantees the lowest possible quantity of logical bugs in the program, which are usually very hard to find. Using automatically generated logs makes the debugging process as easy as possible.

In this example of using SWITCH technology several parallely working interacting automats were used. Automats interact exchanging their states. Nested automats were used as well. Another feature of the project is that classes are used as “envelopes” of correlating automats. There’s no more than one automat in each class. Using classing makes it possible to use class codes several times for similar objects i.e. valves and heaters.

The project was developed using Borland C++ Builder 3.0.